1060 The Truth About Breathing & Why You’re Doing It Wrong w/James Nestor

“There is going to be an explosion of focus on breathing. There used to be. We forgot about it for 40 years and here we are again.”Today's guest is author and journalist James Nestor, who believes that the world has lost the ability to breathe properly and after spending years in laboratories, working with researchers at Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions to figure out what went wrong with our breathing, he’s learned how to fix it. Lewis and James have a wide-ranging discussion on the power of breathing through the nose and all the positive effects it has on the body, immune system, mental health, and more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1060Check out James’ website: www.mrjamesnestor.com Read his book: https://www.mrjamesnestor.com/breath Check out Greatness Coaching: www.lewishowes.com/mycoachThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,060 on the power of breathing with James Nestor.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Breathe through your nose all the time. I don't care if your nose is clogged. If you want to make your body a very violent place for viruses to live in, start with breathing through your nose.

• 0:15Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Vitamin D and C. If you see teeth imprints on your tongue, then your mouth is too small for your tongue.

• 0:23Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:46Lewis Howes?

  Oprah Winfrey said, breathe, let go, and remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure. And Terry Gilmets said, the wisest one word sentence, breathe. Again, my guest today is author and journalist James Nestor. James believes that the world has lost the ability to breathe properly. And after spending years in laboratories and ancient burial sites, working with researchers at Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions to figure out what went wrong with our breathing, he's learned how to fix it. And this has got to be one of the most fascinating episodes about the power of truly optimizing something which is as simple sounding as breathing,

• 1:31Lewis Howes?

  but how it makes a massive difference in your life. So in this episode, we break down the difference between breathing through the mouth versus the nose. This is huge if you're not breathing through the nose. How to increase CO2 in the body. How to breathe when you're dealing with anxiety and panic attacks. How to maintain and increase your lung capacity even through old age. How breathing affects our immune system. Why the diaphragm is considered the second heart, and so much more. But before we dive into this, I wanted to let you know that I just launched my greatness coaching program. This is your high performance and big goal achieving system for 2021 and beyond. It includes science-backed coaching, accountability, community,

• 2:15Lewis Howes?

  and my new greatness playbook where you'll reflect, plan, and create short-term actions on your long-term visions for your life. But whether you join greatness coaching or not, creating high-performance systems will be the biggest thing you do to set yourself up for success in 2021 and beyond. If you are already successful in your business or side hustle or coaching and you want to take things to the next level, then go to lewishouse.com/ mycoach to apply and see if you're the right fit right now. As well as you're listening to this episode, make sure to share this with someone who needs to hear it, someone that you care about in your life, that you want to see improve their life and give them inspiration and tools to improve

• 2:54Lewis Howes?

  with their breathing. Just send them to lewishouse.com/1060. And a quick reminder, subscribe to the School of Greatness. If this is your first time here, welcome to the family. Click that subscribe button over on Apple Podcast as well as give us a rating and review at any time during this episode. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only James Nestor.

• 3:17Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness. I am very excited. We have James Nestor in the house. New York Times bestselling author of his latest book, Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. And I'm so glad you're here because I was in India about four years ago on a meditation experience, retreat, learning meditation, then doing meditation instructor training. And it was something fascinating I learned for the first time, at least at this place, that the monks of this facility didn't breathe through their mouth. And it was the first time I learned that it's actually not good to breathe through your mouth. And they breathe through their nose unless they're speaking, unless they're eating, maybe they'll breathe a little bit through

• 3:59Lewis Howes?

  their mouth, obviously as that happens. But most of the time, 90% of the time, they keep their mouth shut, they breathe through their nose, and they seem to be happier overall in general. But it seems to me that most of the world, at least in America, breathe through their mouth. Is that the case in your mind that from all of your research of this, that most people breathe through their mouth?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  The estimates are that somewhere between 25 to 50% of the population habitually breathes through its mouth. And a lot of us think, well, who cares? We've got a mouth, we can breathe through it. But very different breaths you're taking through those two different channels that affect us in various ways.

• 4:37Lewis Howes?

  What's a breath through the mouth due to the body and the mind versus a breath through the nose? One of them. And then what is a day of that consistently doing for a body?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I'll introduce my friend here at this time.

• 4:49Lewis Howes?

  Yes, I love this. Show me the science.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  I usually wait a while to bring him on.

• 4:53Lewis Howes?

  Let's bring it.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Now, you called him up. So for people listening and not seeing this, I'm showing a cross section of a human skull. And so you will notice if you take a breath in through your nose, it has to run this gauntlet of different structures, past different tissues, past cilia, before it makes it into the throat, before it makes it into your lungs. If you look at the mouth, none of that is there. So when you are breathing through your nose, you are humidifying air, you're pressurizing it, you're filtering it so that you can use that air so much more efficiently. So yes, we can breathe through our mouths. What a wonderful thing. We have a backup delivery system for our lungs. That does not mean you should be breathing

• 5:37Speaker 01

  through your mouth throughout the day. And this is something the ancients have known for thousands of years, and modern Westerners just have not been hip to this fact.

• 5:46Lewis Howes?

  Why is this not taught to us at a younger age to be nose breathers over mouth breathers?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  This is an eternal question that I've asked myself for years and years, because the science is so clear, that when you're mouth breathing, you're going to make yourself more susceptible to respiratory ailments. You're going to be denying yourself more oxygen. You can actually change the shape of your face if you breathe through your mouth. When you're young, the skelicature will start forming to that slack-jawed posture, and you will have this long face. I'm a great example of this, right? Because I was mouth breathing through a lot of my youth and even up into adulthood. But there is more than 50 years of research on this stuff.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Down at Stanford, which is very close to me, and it's indisputable. No one is arguing with this research, and yet, go around and look, and what do you see? A bunch of mouth breathers wherever you go.

• 6:45Lewis Howes?

  I had Andrew Huberman on recently. I'm not sure if you've been familiar with his work at Stanford.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Friend, oh yeah, absolutely.

• 6:51Lewis Howes?

  And, and he was sharing some breathing techniques and the power of breathing for the mind and the neuroscience behind breath, and he was talking about a powerful breathing technique, which is a, a, a deep, long inhale through the nose with an additional breath at the top of it. So a, where you can really, that's when you actually oxygenate the most of the, the body and the cells, I guess. I'm not sure if that language is correct, but you're opening up pathways and creating more energy in the body when you breathe that way, uh, as opposed to through the mouth. I've been studying a lot of your videos on Instagram and the different work that you've been doing. And you've had, you've interviewed so many different doctors and scientists and researchers

• 7:34Lewis Howes?

  on sleep apnea, on human performance from breathing. I feel like, um, a couple of things happened when I was a kid. I always breathed with my mouth open. And I have one theory, maybe you can correct me if this is true or not, one theory that my teeth, although genetics play a factor in it, my teeth became very crooked because I always had my mouth open at night breathing and during the day and working out. Is that theory, uh, true? Or is it more genetic that my mouth is, you know, messed up with my teeth?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  It's all those things, but oral posture plays such a huge role in this. And this is something that people are just starting to realize right now. If you look at our ancestors, they all had perfectly straight teeth.

• 8:22Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Very wide faces, these very broad jaws. If you don't believe me, go look at a skull, anything older than around 500 years old. I've looked at hundreds of these things.

• 8:33Lewis Howes?

  They have big, wide jaws, big mouths.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Huge. And these are the mouths, the jaws that you see in models nowadays. So about 90% of us have this retro natic growth, which means our faces are going backwards, which is one of the reasons why our teeth are crooked, which is another reason why we have smaller airways, smaller mouths, smaller airway breathing problems. So we've known this again for decades and decades. And I had a hard time believing this until I went to the labs, till I was standing in this room surrounded by ancient skulls from people from Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, all over the world, all smiling back with perfectly straight teeth.

• 9:14Lewis Howes?

  Gosh.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  My God, what have we done?

• 9:17Lewis Howes?

  You know, it's interesting you say this. I, when I was 16, trying to, yeah, 16, I had eight teeth removed. Because I was supposed to get braces and they said that my mouth was so small that it was, it was clustering the teeth and that's why I would look like Edward Scissorhands in my mouth, right? And so I had these eight teeth removed and then I decided not to get braces, which is probably the dumb thing. 20 years goes by, my teeth receded back, my top teeth receded back. So that the only teeth that ever touched for the last 20 years were my front two teeth. My back teeth have never felt each other touch until about four months ago.

• 9:57Lewis Howes?

  Cause I finally got Invisalign about a year ago and my, I've been expanding my, my mouth and my teeth out. And it's crazy, the more research I'm doing, I feel like I just did this to myself because of my breathing patterns, especially at night, because my mouth was just always open and relaxed as opposed to shut. Now, it's one theory I wanted to have clarified from you. Another theory, I listened to a doctor of dentistry tell me that almost all disease comes through the mouth. Uh, that we pick up almost all of it comes through the mouth from ingesting, from breathing, all these different things. And the reason why people that breathe through the nose are usually

• 10:38Lewis Howes?

  healthier is because they're not breathing in the, the viruses or the disease that we might carry with the filtration system through the nose that catches it a lot more. Is that accurate as well?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  So the first part of that, looking at the mouth and teeth. So why do we get our teeth straightened? We get our teeth straightened because they grow in crooked. Why do they grow in crooked? Cause they have a smaller playing field. They have a smaller mouth to grow in straight. So the Western approach to this, and this wasn't always this way, is let's remove more teeth from a mouth that's already crowded. And what's going to happen? The mouth is going to get smaller. So as this mouth gets smaller and smaller and smaller, your airway goes from this to this. So all of these orthodontists, and I've probably talked to 20 of them, right, have said that there is this big wave coming and we're going to

• 11:33Speaker 01

  look at what we've done 10 years from now and be horrified.

• 11:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Because the physics are there. Small mouth, smaller, smaller airway. It's, it's not too hard to get your head around, but the question is, what do we do about it? We acknowledge this problem. And your story, I've heard this a hundred times.

• 11:53Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  From different people. I've had extractions. I've had braces. I've had headgear. My mouth is messed up. My breathing was messed up. You hear this from everyone. And uh, it, it, it was pretty shocking to me to, to realize that breathing could be affected so significantly.

• 12:12Lewis Howes?

  Isn't it interesting that we focus a lot on what we eat, how we sleep, we focus on hydration, nutrition, working out. But we can go a long time without eating or drinking something, but we can't go a long time without breathing the right way. And yet we hardly ever focus on the art of practicing how to breathe. Isn't it amazing that a lot of challenges we're faced with as humans, whether it be our teeth, our breathways, inflammation, the ability to uh, exert energy in workouts or whatever it may be. Are all affected from our ability to breathe or a lack of understanding how to breathe. Are we supposed to breathe through our chest? Are we supposed to breathe through more of our diaphragm? When do we breathe?

• 12:58Lewis Howes?

  How do our ancestors know this instinctively? And we don't.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Our ancestors didn't need to know this, just like they didn't need to know the latest CrossFit exercise to stay fit, just like they didn't need to know what foods to eat to be healthy, because they were living in a very different world than our own. Our ancestors weren't doing pushups or burpees, right? They didn't need to, because they were walking for four hours a day. They didn't need to avoid sugars or high carb foods, because they were eating everything natural and raw. So when it comes to breathing, we have this amazing organ called our nose, which dictates so much of how the air should be coming in and how we should be using it. It's harder to breathe through your nose, right?

• 13:41Lewis Howes?

  It is.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  It takes more time, it pressurizes it. That's all good, because that allows your lungs to absorb more oxygen. You get 20% more oxygen breathing through your nose than you do equivalent breaths through your mouth.

• 13:54Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  So because of how long it takes, because of the pressure and because of a significant release of nitric oxide, which is in our sinus cavities. Nitrous oxide, and it's not, um, it's not nitrous, it's nitric oxide. So don't go out and, and, uh, you know, uh, get those little things that fill up balloons or whipped cream and do them.

• 14:17Lewis Howes?

  That's not good.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  You'll get very high.

• 14:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  You want nitric oxide, which is the stuff that is released when people take Viagra or other sexual, um, uh, sex performing drugs, so enhancing drugs.

• 14:29Lewis Howes?

  So breathing through your nose could make you more aroused?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but I will say, um, arousal comes with a relaxation, a parasympathetic response. An orgasm is associated with a sympathetic response. We calm ourselves parasympathetically with slow breaths. We arouse ourselves with.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Breath. So you could see how whenever you you happen to be coupling with with whomever, your breath is following the the arc of the experience in a lot of ways. And that that's not by accident. Those those two things are are very uniquely combined there.

• 15:13Lewis Howes?

  You've been studying this for a while now, and you're doing like a deep dive studies as well before that and water and things like that. This seems like this is something that's been fascinating you to research and understand. What have been the three biggest findings that you've realized that were kind of shocking or just big eye openers that you realized you were doing the complete opposite of, or it's been impacting you in such a negative way that you've now changed in your daily lifestyle?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Think the first one is breathing too much. A lot of us think that by breathing more, we are getting more oxygen to our hungry cells in our bodies. False. We're doing the opposite, and I'll show you what I mean by that. Right now, if you take 10 to 20 big breaths,

• 15:59Speaker 01

  you're gonna feel some lightness in your head. You're gonna feel some tingling in your fingers. If you keep breathing that way, your extremities will get a little cooler. That's not from an increase of oxygen, but from a lack of circulation in those areas. So by breathing slowly, you actually can increase circulation and delivering, deliver more oxygen to these areas.

• 16:20Lewis Howes?

  Really? So so if I'm in a a cold state, I go outside, I'm, you know, I'm from Ohio and it's winter time. And it's cold and usually we're like shivering. You're saying we should be actually slowing our breath in that cold state to allow us to get more oxygen? Or what does that mean?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  It it depends what you're wearing. It depends how cold it is. It depends on who you are, what what your fat content is in your body. But having said that, there are numerous breathing techniques that allow people to sit in the snow for hours at a time and not get frostbite and not get hypothermia. And scientists are still wondering, how the hell do they do it? You can see videos of these monks. They put them in Harvard Medical School researcher, put these guys in a cold room, put a wet sheet over them. They breathed in this way and they dried the sheet. So within about

• 17:15Lewis Howes?

  They dried the sheet.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  That's right. And you can, this is all available on YouTube. It's available in a study published in Nature, which is the most esteemed scientific journal out there.

• 17:25Lewis Howes?

  And there's obviously lots of studies with Wim Hof, who I know you've connected with. I was in Poland with Wim. I took a trip with the 13 guys that I sent there earlier this year and got to experience this firsthand with him and, and experiencing it as well. So what types of, uh, so that's one thing that, uh, you know, this fast breathing, uh, is not the, the way you should go in general, depending on all these factors, but more slow breathing, uh, to help you kind of get the oxygen through your extremities. What's the next thing?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  When you're working out, a good thing to do is to practice breathing less. So there's slow breathing and there's less breathing. And these are two different things because if you're breathing slow, but you're taking in a larger volume, that is still breathing at your metabolic rate. But by decreasing your breathing, something called hypoventilation training, which is getting huge right now, you can mimic the effects of altitude training.

• 18:22Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  You, yes, you can release more EPO, um, build more red blood cells, um, and, and all of these things. That's what Lance got, got busted for, shooting up EPO. But you can do this naturally. And they've, they've been doing so many studies in this. Xavier Warren's in, in Paris has been doing studies in this. And various Olympians have, have adopted this breathing technique. It's not fun because the one need in life is to breathe.

• 18:50Lewis Howes?

  Breathe.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  So I've done it. Uh, not fun, but it is amazing to feel your body compensating. Instead of having your fingers cold, just everything is hot because you've just got blood pumping throughout your body. Um, so pretty interesting stuff.

• 19:08Lewis Howes?

  About a month ago, I committed to doing my first marathon. So I've been doing longer runs, which is not fun for me. And, uh, I've been a, I would say a, a high level performing athlete most of my life, from playing professional football back in the day to playing on the USA men's national handball team currently for the last 10 years. And just as an active person, uh, doing a lot of different sports. It's really hard to slow your breathing down when you are sprinting, when you're running fast long distances, when you're doing a CrossFit type of workout. Is it healthy to to slow it down when your body, your heart rate is pumping so fast? And it's saying, I need to breathe. Is it good to say, okay, let me restrict it right now, breathe slower when it feels

• 19:52Lewis Howes?

  like your heart is gonna pump out of your chest?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  What you want to be doing is be breathing all the time within your metabolic needs. So you don't want to be over breathing, you don't want to be under breathing. But so many of us are conditioned to over breathe all the time. That's what I'm saying. Breathing less can be very beneficial. What you want to be is efficient, especially in athletics, especially in performance. Why do you want to go expend more energy to do something when you could expend less energy to work at that same level, which means you can push it harder, you can run faster, you can run further. And they've done studies with with people who have been running marathons and looked at their heart rates, mouth breathing versus nasal breathing.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  And one guy, when he was nasal breathing, you know, 26 miles, heart rate was the same the whole time because he was pivoting into his parasympathetic state. This is the state in which your body is allowed to use oxygen most efficiently. You know, as Westerners, we're just like cram it in, cram it in, throw out what we don't want, cram it in. You know that it's most efficient and it's best for your body to be working right in line with its coherence. So right in line with its needs. You wouldn't get in a sports car and just rev it at every stop sign and just completely pin the RPMs everywhere you go. The motor is gonna wear out, right? Our body is the same thing.

• 21:20Lewis Howes?

  Is there ever a time as an athlete pushing the limits that's good to breathe through your mouth?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  You would have to talk to my buddy, Brian McKenzie, who deals with elite athletes all the time. I think once you get to a certain threshold, to a certain stage, I'm talking top tier athletes here, right? Then you can start exploring that in your zone five, your zone four. But what he's told me and what four other breathing therapists have told me is never work out harder than you can breathe correctly. So this doesn't mean when you're, uh, you know, about ready to dunk on someone and it's the finals in the NBA, you can't open your mouth. Just slam it on someone. That's fine. What I'm focusing on is habitual.

• 22:09Lewis Howes?

  Like 90% of the time, you should be breathing through your nose, even when you're pushing your boundaries as an athlete. And you feel like you can't get the oxygen. Are you saying that if you're training properly, the body should start to adapt and be able to?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  That's exactly what I'm saying. And there's 40 years of research with Dr. John Deweyard, who has proven that you get more oxygen breathing through your nose. So why do you want if, if, and, and breathing deeply? If you think about breath, okay, you take in a breath, it's going to go into your mouth, it's going to go into your throat. It's going to go into your, your bronchi here, but it takes a while to actually get to your lungs. So why would you want to breathe a bunch of very short, shallow breaths? You're not using that air. So 50% of it is going into your body and out without ever being. By breathing slower and deeper, you can increase your efficiency by 35% over breathing shallow.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  So, and this is something I was hooked up with a Stanford experiment with pulse, with a pulse oximeter on a bike and pushing it as hard as I could, breathing through my nose at a rate of six breaths per minute, which is about a quarter. And I said, I have to be, my O2 has to be just sinking now. It stayed the same the whole time.

• 23:28Lewis Howes?

  Six breaths a minute?

• 23:30Speaker 01

  We were, this was all through the nose. We were trying to find the breaking point of when I was losing oxygen. But what dictates that need to breathe is not oxygen. It is carbon dioxide. So.

• 23:43Lewis Howes?

  In the, in the muscles or in the blood? What is that?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  It's in the, it's in the blood. Yes. CO2 is, is what we off gas. I'm blowing off CO2 there, right? So if you were to exhale and to hold your breath, you're going to feel that naggy need to breathe. It's not oxygen. That's increasing levels of CO2. So once you acknowledge that and understand that an increase of CO2 can actually be very beneficial, it changes your relationship with how you breathe.

• 24:13Lewis Howes?

  So we want to increase CO2 in the body because more CO2 will mean we need to breathe less?

• 24:22Speaker 01

  More CO2 will allow oxygen to disassociate from red blood cells more easily. To be clear, people with emphysema, people with COVID, you don't need any more CO2. I'm talking about healthy, healthy people who don't have underlying conditions. An increase of CO2, including for asthmatics and panic sufferers, has been found to be profoundly beneficial because most of us breathe too much, which guess what happens? We offload too much CO2. And without that CO2, our bodies have to work harder to get oxygen. This is so complicated. Sorry you have to go through this process, but especially for a journalist. I've never went to medical school, had to learn this stuff,

• 25:06Speaker 01

  but we've known it for 120 years. It's just few people are paying attention to it.

• 25:10Lewis Howes?

  You know, when I do the Wim Hof method and when I'm with Wim and he's like, okay, let's do a few rounds and then breathe all the air out. So there's no air in your lungs. And then you can do more pushups than you've ever done before with no, I guess, air stored in the lungs, but it's oxygenated throughout the body. What are your thoughts on techniques like that for performance?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  I think they're fantastic. And I think the science is very clear on that, whether or not it's Wim Hof method. And by the way, Wim, it makes no claims that he invented this stuff, right? These breathing techniques have been around for thousands and thousands of years. And it's no coincidence that Wim Hof method does the exact same thing as Sudarshan Kriya, which does the exact same thing as Pranayamas. They all have you really breathe.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Hold your breath or breathe really slowly and they go through these cycles. So what you're doing there is you're offloading CO2. You are uploading oxygen. When you hold your breath, that CO2 goes up, that oxygen releases into all your cells and you start all over again. So I found, I tried to do Wim's breathing too, whatever you want to call it. You know, four, five times a week. I'm a huge fan of it. I see big benefits of it. And with breath work and athletes, trust me on this, in the next five years, it's already happening. There is going to be an explosion of focus on breathing. There used to be, we forgot about it for 40 years and here we are again.

• 26:43Lewis Howes?

  If someone's only got five minutes a day, what's the best breathing strategy routine? To just give them a boost or get them more intentional and grounded for the day. What would that be for you? Is it a set of cycles? Is it a deep breathing? Is it a calm breathing? What? What would you recommend?

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Everyone's different. What they need is different. So this is why these blanket prescriptions for entire populations don't really work too well, except for a subset of people. But there is a certain foundation of breathing. It doesn't matter if you're an asthmatic. If you have anxiety, if you're an athlete, you can all benefit from. So these steps are breathe through your nose all the time. I don't care if your nose is clogged. If it's clogged, find a way of clearing it. You have to breathe through your nose, people. The second one is to breathe slowly, to breathe less, of course, and to exhale fully. A lot of us are conditioned, this is very typical Western mindset, to put more and more in, more and more in.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Air on top of air. In order to get a full breath of air, you need to get the old breath out. And you need to focus on your exhales and exhalations. So a simple thing, and just because something's simple doesn't mean it's effective. Look at nutrition. The most simple nutrition is the most effective. After 50 years of trying to find ways of hacking out, I'm going to pull this vitamin out and put it in this powder. We're back at square one. Oh.

• 28:10Lewis Howes?

  Just eat vegetables.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  We've been saying this for a long time. So breathing is the same. If there's one piece of advice I would give to people beyond that nasal part is try to breathe in to a count of about five or six. Relax yourself. Don't challenge yourself. Breathe out to that same count. If you want to relax yourself even more, extend the exhale. Nature is simple, yet subtle, and your body will respond to this. And if you have heart rate variability monitor, if you have a pulse ox, look at what happens to your heart rate. Look at what happens to your heart rate variability. When you slow down the breaths and you breathe in a rhythm, this affects how we think. It affects the emotional centers in the brain.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  So it affects the entire body because of course it does. It's breathing. It's our most basic biological need.

• 29:00Lewis Howes?

  Why do you think we have adopted this other style? Once we, when we knew this 40, 60 years ago, hundreds of years ago, we've, we've known this. Is it just a change in the society or something else?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Well, some of it is anatomical. So we, our faces have fundamentally changed as we were just talking about earlier. That's part of it. So even if you focus on healthy breathing at night, you have sleep apnea, you have snoring because our faces have changed. Some of it is environmental. If you think of what happened in the Victorian era, people started wearing corsets, okay, really tight vests, really tight belts. What happens when you do that? You can't take a deep breath.

• 29:42Lewis Howes?

  Breathe.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Add to that pollution, add to that allergens, add to that stress, add to that, um, working in an office where you're in a chair like this and you're stressed out and you can't take a deep breath even if you want to. And you've got this perfect cocktail of illness. And if you don't believe me, go look at what's happened to people in the past 50 years from BMI to asthma to COPD. I mean, things are out of control and it's so common now that people just think, ah, yeah, I snore, my wife has sleep apnea, I, you know, sleep in another room. There's nothing normal about this.

• 30:20Lewis Howes?

  What's the best way to reverse sleep apnea?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  It really depends where your sleep apnea is, nasopharynx, oropharynx, hypopharynx. For a lot of people, this is an issue from, and I'm not saying everyone, I would never say that, some people absolutely need surgery. But, so we have this muscle tube, it's our throat and all these soft tissues at the back of our mouth. When you just eat soft foods, which is 95% of the diet today, even what's considered healthy, yogurt, oatmeal, avocados, all this stuff is soft. All of those areas get flabby, just like anything else would

• 31:00Lewis Howes?

  It's a workout in your mouth, yeah.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  You need to work them out. So there's this whole new branch of science called myofunctional therapy, where they have these kids and adults do exercises with their tongues. This is an extremely powerful muscle, right? And if it's not working out.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  It's gonna get flabby.

• 31:21Lewis Howes?

  Did you have a lot of sleep apnea yourself?

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Not too much. I was snoring for a little while years and years ago. Um, I'm surprised because I have, you know, I've had extractions. I've had all the other problems, but I had numerous respiratory issues. I was working out all the time, eating all the right food. I was surfing. I was boxing. I was sleeping eight hours, kept getting pneumonia, kept getting bronchitis.

• 31:46Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Wheezing and was told like people just say, yeah, you're getting old dude. This is how it is. I said, ah, I don't quite believe that. So, once I really learned about what's happened to our airways, um, basically everyone, and once you understand what's happened, you can figure out ways of fixing it. So, for people with mild or moderate sleep apnea, and anyone can look up these studies online, these oral pharyngeal exercises, I'm not gonna do them now because they, they look pretty weird, but they have had a significant effect on snoring and sleep apnea. Work out for your mouth. Why not? It's free, right?

• 32:23Lewis Howes?

  What are they called? Oral what?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Oral pharyngeal exercises, and I'm happy to send you a few links.

• 32:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I gotta check this out. Is there a benefit with practicing breathing through one nostril and another nostril for the brain, for memory, for health? Is this a thing?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  It is. And if anyone is not driving, I guess you could do this driving, um, but you can just take a finger or thumb or whatever you want and just block your right nostril and breathe in through your left nostril. So, there's been, and breathe in and out through your left nostril. There's about 20 years of studies showing that when you breathe through this channel, you were, you will lower blood pressure, your heart rate will lower, and you will stimulate more of the right quote unquote creative side of your brain. Now, the right nostril inhaling through that has the opposite effect. It stimulates you. Blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up. So there's this thing in yoga called alternate nostril breathing, right?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  That has you use these different channels to elicit different moods or put you into different states.

• 33:35Lewis Howes?

  How often should you be practicing this? This is like a one minute a day type of thing? Is this every hour on the hour? You do this for a few seconds? What do you think is the best process?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  You shouldn't have to be practicing it at all. And I say that because going back to that, we shouldn't be focus, have to focus on our diet or exercise. But the modern era is requiring us to. And what I mean by that in regards to your nose is your nostrils are covered with erectile tissue. And this erectile tissue inflames and grows flaccid, just like the erectile tissue you know where. So our noses throughout the day, when I learned this down at Stanford, it just blew my mind. One nostril will naturally open for about a half an hour to three or four hours. And then gently close and the other one will naturally open.

• 34:26Lewis Howes?

  All day?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  All day long.

• 34:29Lewis Howes?

  This is happening to us.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  It's going back. Sometimes they're both open and then they both, so your body-

• 34:35Lewis Howes?

  It's kind of like when you have a little congestion, sometimes it's on one side and it's like, it comes out the other nose like five hours later. You're like, what's going on?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  This is, this is the cycle in, in our noses that our bodies naturally do. And if you think about how breathing air through these different nostrils affects our physiology, affects us mentally. What a fantastic thing that our bodies are, are turning on the, the throttle, putting on the brakes.

• 35:01Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Backed and forth. So if you're breathing through your mouth, like this guy, you get none of this, zero.

• 35:11Lewis Howes?

  Wow, it's kind of like nature's- Night and day, like one nostril, maybe, or like when the waves come in and when they go back, it's like allowing nature to happen inside of your nasal cavity, which affects the rest of your body and the mind, I'm assuming. This is fascinating. Do you know how often that is? Is that like every few hours it changes? What's the rhythm?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  It's about every thirty minutes to three or four hours it switches. And once you know this, you could, right now, my right is more obstructed than my left. My left is a lot more open. Ancient yogis believe that all humans shared these same patterns, and they did a study a couple decades ago, where they looked at people and had them gauge how they were breathing throughout their noses. And when the moon was at its strongest,

• 36:06Speaker 01

  during a full moon and during a new moon, everyone was synchronized.

• 36:12Lewis Howes?

  No way. What do you mean? Like one nose is clogged during, for everyone during a new moon or something?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:19Lewis Howes?

  Well, this is crazy.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  More, more studies need to be done, of course. This is one study, but this is why I included this. This stuff sounded insane to me, but there it is on the National Institute of Health Library. So.

• 36:36Lewis Howes?

  This is fascinating. So how long have you been practicing this new way of breathing for yourself personally?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  So people think that since I wrote this book about breathing, I'm now just the badass breather. I'm just, I got it locked in. I'm, no, I am a science journalist and tried to take an objective view of this. Yeah, I picked up a few tricks from the experts in the field, which I have felt completely transformed from. But I am not the guru to be disseminating, you know, you have this problem, breathe this way. That's, there are other people that do this so well. Having said that, again, this stuff is easy. This isn't requiring you to go keto. It's not requiring you to go vegan. It's not requiring you to run ten miles a day. We carry our breath with us all day long,

• 37:26Speaker 01

  and we can focus that breath, and you will see instant benefits from doing this. Science is very clear.

• 37:32Lewis Howes?

  Have you seen through the research and the science, people applying this new way of breathing, or I guess old way of breathing? Uh, that people are able to do things like cure asthma or other respiratory problems through a healthier breathing technique. Have you seen this?

• 37:50Speaker 01

  So I've talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of these people, people who had had asthma for 50 years, who have been on bronchodilators, oral steroids. If you stay on oral steroids for too long, it starts impacting your bones, um, which is why increased risk of osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, I mean, it worsening asthma, it's bad news. And again, this is no, no controversy about this. But what do you do? You can't get off this stuff because then you'll die of an asthma attack. So, uh, this story was written about in the New York Times about how someone, um, a, he was a violin maker in Vermont, just started breathing in this different way, breathing within his metabolic needs instead of over breathing.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Asthmatics over breathe all the time. They breathe through their mouth. He was able to get rid of oral steroids that he'd been on for decades. And he was going from 20 pumps of a bronchodilator to, I think, two a day. And I read this in the New York Times, so this is not a sketchy journal. And I said, what is going on here? So I spent months and months talking to the top researchers in this field. And a lot of people think that asthma, oh, I inherited it. There's nothing, it's an incurable disease. I can't do anything about it. I have to stay on these drugs. That is not true. If you look at the scientific literature and if you look at these people who have done NIH studies into asthma and breathing and what a huge impact it's going to have.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  I want to be perfectly clear. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a breathing therapist. Okay? I'm not saying go ditch your bronchodilators. No. I'm saying that you should, if you have asthma, it would be worth your time to explore how breathing can help benefit you, how it can help blunt the symptoms. But don't do anything per this advice. I just

• 39:39Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Put that big label on there.

• 39:40Lewis Howes?

  Of course. And what, and what would you say are some best practices from your research? When our nasal passages are congested, how do we, we can't breathe through your nose for five days for whatever reason, what's the strategy there? Have you, have you heard anyone share that?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  So some people, their noses are so messed up, they need surgical interventions. Absolutely. But for the majority of us, including me, I was a perfect candidate for surgery, right? Broken this nose about four times, basketball, surfing, like, I'm a complete mess. But I wanted to see what my body could do, and I was able to restore so much of that damage through breathing, to open up these passageways. So a nice trick, if you are congested, is to exhale, and you hold your breath, and you hold your nostrils, and you move your head back and forth, you move your head up and down until you feel a significant need to breathe. Then you calmly exhale through your nose,

• 40:43Speaker 01

  and inhale again, and then wait about forty-five seconds to a minute, and do that same thing over again. So what you're doing is you are increasing that magical molecule, carbon dioxide, which is a vasodilator, which helps to open your nose. So there's a lot of YouTube tutorials on this, and it's free.

• 41:05Lewis Howes?

  Right, so first, close your nose, then exhale, or exhale, then close your nose?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  You can exhale, then close your nose.

• 41:13Lewis Howes?

  Get all, get all the air out of first, then close your nose, go up and down, side to side, then exhale more, or then inhale?

• 41:22Speaker 01

  You can inhale through your nose from that.

• 41:24Lewis Howes?

  Then inhale through your nose.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  If it's still congested, just be very calm about this. Don't, just calmly inhale and try that again. Patrick McEwen, who's been doing this stuff for twenty years, has a lot of free tutorials on YouTube.

• 41:40Lewis Howes?

  He seems pretty fascinating with his research, yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  This guy is someone who had severe asthma, severe health problems, was getting no help from anyone, figured out how to breathe, now has zero symptoms of asthma, and is teaching thousands of asthmatics what he did. He was a business guy, right? He had no intention of doing this, and his life took a hard left turn into this world. So he's scientific, he's a, he's a great practitioner. He's, he healed himself through it, so it's worth listening to him.

• 42:13Lewis Howes?

  For those who struggle with extreme anxiety or panic attacks, it seems like more and more people are dealing with anxiety and panic attacks. What's the easiest way to calm down using breathing that you've discovered?

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Slow your breathing down. So there was a study about 10 years ago, NIH study by Alicia Marette down at Southern Methodist University. She went to Harvard and Stanford and she gathered a bunch of different people who were suffering from panic. And she just had them slow down their breathing and increase their CO2 levels. I know I keep saying CO2, but, but this is, this is the stuff, people. And something like 96% of these people, a year after the study concluded, said they were much improved or very much improved. The majority of them stopped having panic attacks. Because what happens when we're panicked? Okay?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  I'm sitting here with you. Oh, I feel claustrophobic.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  The more you breathe like that, the more you're going to exacerbate and hasten that attack. So when you feel it coming on, you don't stop and take a deep breath. You stop and take a slow and light breath into your lungs, right? And control your body and control your breathing. And this is such a profound effect on people. And again, that, that study, um, it was published top scientific journal. It's available for everyone. It just, I, I find it so bizarre. And I should mention that my father-in-law is a pulmonologist, my brother-in-law is an ER doc. I'm a huge fan of Western medicine, but it's so bizarre that people with panic, people with asthma,

• 44:02Speaker 01

  no one's looking at how they're breathing, right? They're, they're given these, these pills and powders and, and put on their way. And the science is, is very clear on this stuff. It can have a really profound effect.

• 44:14Lewis Howes?

  Does the mind or thoughts when we're in a panic or stressed or fight or flight moment, does the mind or thoughts influence the breathing or does the breathing influence the mind?

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Great question. It goes both ways. So what you're thinking is going to influence how you're breathing. But the wonderful thing is sometimes you can't take control of those thoughts, right? You get nervous, you can't turn that off. But you can take control of your breathing. And eighty percent of the messages are coming from the body to the brain, not to the brain, not from the brain to the body. So just by allowing yourself, think whatever you want to think, but slow down your breathing to the way that you would be breathing when you're calm, and you will start shooting calming messages into your brain.

• 45:04Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Take control of those, those states. And this is something that Huberman has been studying for years down at Stanford, right? With the, with the phrenic nerve and the way that the diaphragm moves, how that diaphragm moves is going to affect the signals that your brain is going to get, going to get, and it's going to affect how you're going to be processing things.

• 45:25Lewis Howes?

  How the diaphragm moves?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  So the diaphragm is this amazing muscle that sits underneath the lungs. The lungs don't inflate and deflate themselves, right? They need something to do it. So we have this crazy muscle. It looks like a parachute or an umbrella, that when we breathe in, that diaphragm goes down. And when we breathe out, that diaphragm goes up. So this rhythmic motion of this diaphragm, the diaphragm works as a pump. Some researchers have said the heart is a secondary pump. The diaphragm is the main pump. So when you're, when your diaphragm's going like this, it is sending panic signals to your brain. This is like, you know, red alert, things are bad. But if your diaphragm is going like this, this

• 46:11Speaker 01

  is sending calming signals, right?

• 46:14Lewis Howes?

  So it's almost like you could be stressed out in your mind, but the moments or moments you start to slow your breathing, it's going to send signal back to your mind that everything's better. You don't need to stress as much. So you, if you can control your body, you'll control your mind.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  So guess what Navy SEALs do before they go in for some black ops mission, really intense stuff, they start breathing in a box pattern. Four in, hold four, exhale four, hold four. Four in, hold four. Imagine a box. If you look at what's happening there, you're in for four, but you are holding or exhaling for three quarters of the time. So the longer you hold and the longer you exhale, the more you're going to be eliciting that parasympathetic, that calming response. So these guys aren't going to sleep, right? They're trying to focus themselves to be the biggest badasses on the planet, right? To go take care of business in an efficient way. They can't have their brains just all over the place. What, what

• 47:15Speaker 01

  are you saying? Panic. They can't panic. They're dead. So this is a technique that anyone can use. I mean, the vast majority of us aren't going to be in that scenario, but we can breathe the way that they breathe and that so many other people do to focus our thoughts, to take, take advantage of our breathing, to take over certain states, anxiety or anger.

• 47:39Lewis Howes?

  Can you explain why the diaphragm is sometimes referred to as the second heart?

• 47:44Speaker 01

  So the diaphragm, again, is this huge pump. It's almost like the heart is a sump pump, right? It's just doing all the other work, just the additional work. But the diaphragm is enormous. And as you're breathing in and out, it is pumping blood, okay? It is helping to pump blood, but it does something else. A lot of people view breathing as just a biochemical act, right? Getting oxygen in, getting CO2 out. It is a biomechanical act. So when the diaphragm goes down, it also softly massages the organs, which helps us leach out more lymph fluid. So it is the pump for lymph fluid. So everything in the body should be

• 48:26Speaker 01

  moving. You know, you can think about it like a pond gets scummy, right? And a lot of stuff starts growing it because it's still water. That's not what happens with a river. And our bodies want to act like a river. Things, things are static for too long, does not like that. That's where problems occur.

• 48:45Lewis Howes?

  What's better for the body and your health? Chest breathing or lower belly breathing? Like, where is the diaphragm sitting? Is it in between the two? Is it a mixture of both?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  So, a lot of us are chest breathing throughout the day. And when we chest breathe, this is associated with a sympathetic or fight or flight response. What happens when you get scared?

• 49:11Speaker 01

  But instead, people are doing this all, all day. So, when you breathe like that, a sympathetic response, it's amazing. This is what has kept our species alive. It focuses us. It shifts blood from less important organs to the heart and the skeletal muscles. So, we can like fight or we can run. But it's meant only to be in that state for shorts, short amounts of time. So, if we stay in the sympathetic chest breathing state for too long, we are cutting off other organs and a bunch of problems can happen in those organs because of that. I won't go down the laundry list, just trust me on this. So, to answer your question, you want to breathe lightly, fluidly, and deeply.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  This does not mean you have to just go for it every breath and push out your stomach. It means you should be breathing through your nose. Nasal breathings are, are deeper, okay? These go to the lower lobes. At the bottom of the lungs is where we have the largest profusion of blood. So, that's where oxygen exchange can happen much more efficiently. So, light, slow, and deep. That's how we should be breathing.

• 50:21Lewis Howes?

  And less.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Ordinarily, you would say breathe in line with your metabolic needs. But I'm saying for the vast majority, less is, that's your metabolic.

• 50:30Lewis Howes?

  That's what you got you. And is it true that our lungs get smaller as we age? And if so, can breathing practices prevent this from allowing us to have more expansive lungs?

• 50:42Speaker 01

  So what happens from ages around thirty to fifty, you're gonna lose about fifteen to sixteen percent of your lung capacity. Oh, man, that sucks. Fifty, it just goes down very, very quickly. That sucks. The problem, well, there's good news behind this. I'm gonna depress you, then I'm gonna inspire you back twice. So the problem is our ribs get a lot less flexible, our intercostals get less flexible. But what's great about this is you can reverse that damage. Guess what yoga does? I'm gonna have you reach your arm like this, breathe into this lung and be flexible,

• 51:22Speaker 01

  and now breathe into this lung. So yoga is essentially just allowing us not only to maintain our lung capacity, but increase it. I've worked with freedivers who have doubled their lung capacity. So. Doubled? Average adult male, six liters. This guy had twelve liters. So I think he had, he was abnormally large. I won't say quite doubled, maybe forty, you know, seventy percent larger. So it's not uncommon to increase your lung capacity thirty percent by, by including these exercises by breathing properly. And especially when we get older, this is so important. We

• 52:02Speaker 01

  don't want to go down that entropy, right? And be, we at least want to sustain it. If we can increase it, great. What's the benefit to increasing our lung capacity? It's the same benefit of having a larger gas tank in a car, right? So if you're driving cross-country, do you want to stop and fill up every hour? Or do you want to stop and fill up every six hours? Right. By having larger lungs allows you to take fewer breaths and to get more oxygen with those breaths. It's about being efficient. So when we're breathing slower and when we're breathing deeply into our lungs at our metabolic need, our heart can work so much more softly.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  We aren't overworking it. When we're breathing twice the amount into our chest.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Just feel your heart rate when you do that. The heart hates this. Why do you want to overwork your heart? You should, it should just be doing what it needs to do, not compensating for your bad habits. And that's what this larger lung capacity, the softer, lower breathing allows you to do.

• 53:07Lewis Howes?

  Is there anything that you've learned and that doctors or scientists are saying is essential for us as human beings to practice that you don't practice? For instance, I know sugar is horrible. I know it's the root of all evil in the body and developing cancers and all these things. But I love sugar. You know, I'm better at it. The more I know how horrible it is for me, I'm better at balancing that. But I still love the sugar, you know? Is there anything that you're like, these things I should never do, but I still do it because it's just a bad habit?

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Well, you're talking to a guy who just had a big old chunk of chocolate before I hopped on.

• 53:46Lewis Howes?

  Good thing you don't have it. Good thing you're not with me right now because I'd be sharing that with you.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm with you on that. You know, it's, I, I think it's a little ironic in a lot of wellness circles. People are so stressed out about doing the right thing all the time that they're miserable. To me, the point of wellness is to live a happier and longer life. So why do you want to spend all your time beating yourself up for eating a piece of chocolate or drinking a beer, you know? So I think in moderation is key. I, these breathing practices like Wim Hof method, Sudarshan Kriya, they've been found to be so effective for people with autoimmune problems, asthma, anxiety, depression. But just breathing those slow and easy breaths can, there are so, so many

• 54:35Speaker 01

  benefits to that. And psychologists and psychiatrists have used this for people with anxiety and depression as well. So having said that, as long as you have this foundation of healthy breathing, just like with, with diet, as long as you have a foundation where you're eating a lot of vegetables, right? You're not eating a lot of, of highly processed carbs or not too much sugar. You can have a piece of cake. You can drink a beer. You can have a glass of wine. That's all fine. The same thing with breathing. If you're laughing really hard and you're breathing out of your mouth, who would tell you that's a bad thing, right? I'm talking about the habits, habitual breathing, the 90% of the day, even 80% of the day.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  If you adhere to healthy habits there, it's going to have a downstream positive effect on your health. And the science, the studies, the data has really shown us that.

• 55:26Lewis Howes?

  I was just trying to practice this as I was listening to you. Is there a way to communicate and speak, but also breathe through your nose? Like while you're having a long speech for an hour on stage, do we practice breathing through the nose or out of the nose while you're speaking? I'm not even sure. Is that possible?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  There is, but it's so awkward. And I'll, I'll tell you what I mean by that. When I was talking to these breathing therapists, some of these people on the phone, I thought like they had some, some problems with their brain because they would say this very fluid sentence and they would keep talking and they're still talking, they're still talking, then they would go silent and go,

• 56:03Speaker 01

  and now I'm going to talk some more and talk some more. So

• 56:06Lewis Howes?

  It's not natural. Yeah.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  If I did that on a radio interview or with you, it would be a fricking disaster. So as you can see, I'm breathing through my mouth, right? I'm trying to breathe through my nose when I'm listening, but these aren't healthy breathing habits, but I'm aware of it. So that when I'm off this call, I can go and close my mouth and breathe through my nose the rest of the time. So to answer your question, there is a proper way of doing this, but good luck with your friends if you.

• 56:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, right. Unless you're all breathing experts and you're part of the same language.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  And I've, I've talked to circles of the conversations are really trippy.

• 56:45Lewis Howes?

  Thirty minutes to get a point across. It's like, come on.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  It's like someone gave you nitrous oxide. I knew nitrous oxide was going to come back into that. So.

• 56:54Lewis Howes?

  That's hilarious. Is there any evidence thus far? If training your breathing helps to fight or reduce symptoms for viruses, flu, COVID, anything that could be affecting the immune system and weakening it in a certain way?

• 57:11Speaker 01

  I just talked to David, Dr. Haskam, about this, who has been studying how different habits can help defend our bodies better against COVID. I don't think he's too pumped for this herd immunity thing. He said, "Our best line of defense is ourselves." And so they have looked at how breathing plays this role in inflammation. So inflammation is behind, show me the the top 10 killers in the world, and I guarantee inflammation is behind 90%, even 95% of them. So how we breathe affects inflammation in the body. If we are stressed out right now, and you know how we did that heavy breathing exercise, and you felt some numbness in your fingers, that is inflammation,

• 57:56Speaker 01

  okay? That is blood not getting to these areas. So, so our arteries are becoming inflamed. So it's harder for blood to push through these places. That's, that's what it is. So breathing absolutely plays a role in this. And I should also note that there's been a ton of research looking into nasal breathing, and how that is your first line of defense against COVID.

• 58:22Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Not only does the nose filter out pathogens and bacteria and viruses, but Dr. Louis Ignarro, who won the Nobel Prize in the 90s, has found that that release of nitric oxide interacts directly with viruses to kill them. So

• 58:42Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:44Lewis Howes?

  Breathing, breathing out through the nose, is that what that does?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Breathing through your nose at the whole, the whole time. Okay?

• 58:51Lewis Howes?

  In and out.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  So not, not only is this, is this filtering, because we have nasal hairs, we have cilia, we have all these other structures, but the release of this nitric oxide, the first round of SARS, which was like 14 years ago, they would expose mammalian cells to nitric oxide, and those cells would live so much longer. And it's no coincidence, there are 11 clinical trials right now, looking into giving patients, guess what, nitric oxide, to help them defeat COVID, and to blunt the symptoms of COVID after it happens. We produce nitric oxide in our noses.

• 59:27Lewis Howes?

  So we don't produce it in our mouth?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  We produce it throughout our bodies, but we get a much larger profusion through our noses. Our mouth specifically is not producing any nitric oxide. So if you hum and if you hum on occasion, you increase your nitric oxide 15 fold.

• 59:48Lewis Howes?

  Wait, so humming, why? Just because you have your mouth closed and you're breathing through your nose?

• 59:54Speaker 01

  It releases more nitric oxide, the vibrations of it. So they found this out 10 years ago, 12 years ago. And there's even been this one small study where this guy had chronic sinusitis and he hummed at a prescribed time, four times a day, and he was able to clear his nose.

• 1:00:12Lewis Howes?

  Shut up.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  I'm not saying this is gonna work for everyone, but I'm saying that the science is there. If you look at what nitric oxide interacts directly with pathogens to kill them, okay?

• 1:00:25Lewis Howes?

  That's their whole job.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  It's a vasodilator. It's part of what it does. Remember, it's also Viagra. When you, when someone takes Viagra, they release more nitric oxide, which allows you know what to happen, you know where.

• 1:00:42Lewis Howes?

  So they release it, I mean, they're getting it out of their body, they're getting it, releasing it inside.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  They're releasing more nitric oxide within. It stimulates the release of more nitric oxide.

• 1:00:52Lewis Howes?

  Inside the blood.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:00:55Lewis Howes?

  You're not, you're not breathing out nitric oxide, you're breathing out carbon, right?

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  You breathe out carbon dioxide. That's right. It's really hard to hum and inhale. They were looking at humming and exhalation. And it's, it's also important to note that nitric oxide has a bioavailability of about two to six seconds. So you have to constantly keep producing it, which is why you need to constantly, it really helps to constantly be breathing through your nose, not just, I'm gonna breathe through my nose for, for five minutes and fight off COVID. No, this is something you have to do all the time. If you wanna make your body a very violent place for viruses to live in, I would argue, start with breathing through your nose, take your vitamin D and C.

• 1:01:46Lewis Howes?

  Let's say we're, have our mouth shut 90% of the time, right? Hopefully more throughout the day. You're sleeping with your mouth shut. You know, it's interesting, when I started to sleep without my mouth shut, I stopped snoring. You can't snore with your mouth shut. You can't go, I mean, I guess you could, but it's like your body just learns how to breathe through the nose as opposed to just your tongue flapping around in the back of your mouth, I guess, right? I mean,

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  You, you can snore when you have issues with your, with your nasopharynx. People can, some people can do that, but for a lot of people, simply shutting their mouth at night can open the airway and you, you, you won't snore.

• 1:02:26Lewis Howes?

  That's it. You just shut your mouth. And you stop snoring most of the time.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Moms have been saying this crap for, for 300 years, you know, sit up straight and shut your mouth. Maybe they were right.

• 1:02:38Lewis Howes?

  I know, right? It's interesting. When I went to India four years ago to study this, we were practicing a meditation breathing, you know, cycle. And they were telling us the science behind each one of the reasons why we would hum for a period of time, why it was all breathing through the nose, why you breathe in, uh, let's say for two seconds and you always breathe out for four seconds or you double the breath on the, in the exhale. And they were saying, this is what we've been doing in this practice for thousands of years in India. But they were finding the science that then backs the reasons why each thing is valuable. And they were saying to me that when you hum, it releases more, uh, what is it? Nitric oxide? Is that what it's called?

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  That's it. Yeah.

• 1:03:22Lewis Howes?

  And it helps release that and which defends against disease, all these different things. So it's, it's fascinating that people have been doing this for thousands of years and now the science is catching up to it all.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Well, think about prayers, right? Um, there was a study done about 20 years ago where they looked at the Catholic prayer cycle of the, of the Rosary Ave Maria, and they looked at Om Mani Padme Hum, one of the most famous Buddhist prayers, right? Each of these prayers requires you to, uh, recite a phrase that takes about six seconds. So you're only exhaling when, when you're reciting, when you're vocalizing, always on the exhale. And then it was about a six second break. To inhale. So, so many prayers, satanama, the same exact thing. Um, all of these prayers in these different cultures had the same respiratory rate tied into it. And it turns out that that respiratory rate, you don't need to pray to do this, you can, and that's great.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  But just breathing at that rate will increase oxygen to your brain. It will slow your heart rate, it will increase circulation, and the systems of your body will enter the state of coherence. And you can see this with heart rate variability. All those lines that are disjointed suddenly become these beautiful sine waves. And this is your body really working at peak efficiency. So if you look at humming too, guess what happens when you go, om. All of these prayers, not all of them, many prayers in different cultures incorporate elements of humming, which all do the same thing.

• 1:04:57Lewis Howes?

  Chanting, humming, yeah. I guess you're saying that this, when you breathe through your nose, it, it create, it releases more nitric oxide in the blood. You have to keep doing it. It's not like it's there, you do it for five minutes and it's there all day. You have to continually do this to keep releasing, is that right?

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  That's correct, but if you're, for instance, let's say you're exposed to someone and they're coughing and they look sick. This would be a good time to be breathing through the nose, to be humming, right? To get away from them. Because if this nitric oxide only lasts so long, it's that, that time when the virus comes in, which, which can come into your body and, and make you sick. So that would be the time you would, you would really want that extra plug of nitric.

• 1:05:42Lewis Howes?

  Boost. And so your body isn't releasing it when you breathe through your mouth, but it releases it when you breathe through your nose.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Nitric oxide is released in various areas of the body, but it is not released in your mouth specifically. So you get a far, you get six times more nitric oxide breathing through.

• 1:06:00Lewis Howes?

  Through your nose. And if you're doing it throughout the whole day through your nose, you're constantly boosting your immune system, I'm assuming, you're constantly optimizing relax, relaxation, you're less stressed by doing all this, right?

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Everything you're saying, it affects your nervous system function, it affects your brain, it affects your biochemistry. I mean, I can go on and on.

• 1:06:23Lewis Howes?

  How much of a change have you made in your personal life since researching and studying this? Do you feel like you're 50% of the way there? Are you 80%? What's your personally, your lifestyle like?

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Well, I wanted to address, it's, it's pretty easy to tell people how to breathe well. It's another thing to teach them why they need to breathe well, or what it's doing to their bodies. So that's what I really tried to focus on in the book. Because I was frustrated when I first started this research years ago, finding all these yoga books with 400 breathing techniques with these crazy names. It's like, cool, where, where do I start? What's it doing? So, so the how is really the, the easy part, but what I wanted to tackle, um, beyond the breathing practices is how to enlarge my airway? How to stop from wheezing? How to stop getting bronchitis and pneumonia?

• 1:07:18Lewis Howes?

  So what do you mean enlarge your airway? You mean your mouth? You mean your throat? What does that mean?

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  I'm talking the, the, uh, oral pharynx in the back. So the throat, all those soft tissues, but I was just curious, um, to see if you can expand your mouth. So we've, we've done a very good job in our culture of making small mouths smaller. You're, you're a great example.

• 1:07:41Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  I'm a great example.

• 1:07:43Lewis Howes?

  Now I'm expanding it through braces to widen it. And the fact, not to cut you off, the fascinating thing is they were originally going to make it smaller by closing the gaps. And I'm like, kind of blessed because for 20 years I just had eight teeth. Well, I really had four teeth missing and they took up my wisdom as well. And I'm kind of blessed because I didn't get braces. If I would have gotten braces right away, they would have closed my mouth and pushed the teeth back to make it straight. And My orthodontist was like, if we do this, your tongue is going to be pressed against your teeth. You're going to be speaking, might be messed up. You're, you're going to be, you have no airway. He's like, we need to expand the mouth and put implants in.

• 1:08:28Lewis Howes?

  I was like, why do I get my mouth, my teeth taken out if I were to put fake ones back in there? But it's kind of a blessing where, okay, now we've been expanding it. And I'm hopeful that this will be impacting my health for many years to come because of it.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Well, you just think of the, the physics here. So by you having a larger mouth, by having more room, there's more room for the tongue to naturally lie up on the upper palate. Okay. Instead of sticking out the sides like it does with mine, right? Cause my mouth was shrunk up. You're going to have more room to breathe. So of course you are. And, and the fact that I think it's just so bizarre that for so many years we've been shrinking mouths. And now we're like, maybe that's not the best idea. Maybe we should enlarge them. So they're getting us going in and going out. So I, I did the same thing where I had seen so many case studies of people who had used this device. They just wore it at night, which gently opened up the upper palate.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  So there is a, if you have a clean thumb, don't do this with some dirty COVID thumb. But you can put it on the roof of your mouth and there is a crack. There's a suture. Okay. That crack can open at virtually any age and widen naturally. This is how, when we're born as babies, our heads are this big. And then they double in size. You can feel all these cracks on your head right now. Okay. Those open up. Um, and I wore this device to help expand my upper palate. And I gained about 15 to 20% increases in my airway.

• 1:10:03Lewis Howes?

  You did.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  In, in, in one year, I took a CAT scan too.

• 1:10:08Lewis Howes?

  And you saw the mouth expanded.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  The mouth, there was much more gentle movement in the mouth. The mouth probably expanded, you know,

• 1:10:17Lewis Howes?

  Two millimeters.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Four mil, yeah. But just from having that, this also stimulated some chewing stress. So it worked out these back tissues and the back tissues just opened up. And subjectively, I can say I've never been breathing more freely. I didn't know I could breathe this way. So a lot of people don't need their mouths expanded unless they went through what we went through. But they can do these oral pharyngeal exercises, which can have a significant, significant improvements on your airway health.

• 1:10:52Lewis Howes?

  What is this, a thing you wear? Is this thing you press on there all night or?

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  It is. And, and you know, I've gotten like hundreds of emails of people saying, I want to do this. This is going to solve my asthma. I want to do this. This is going to solve my cancer. Everyone's different, man. And this worked for me. I'm not saying it's going to work for you, but I will say, working out your tongue, there is no bad side effects to that. Okay?

• 1:11:15Lewis Howes?

  What's one tongue exercise we could do?

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  They look grotesque.

• 1:11:19Lewis Howes?

  Give me one. Give me one.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:11:21Lewis Howes?

  All right. At least crazy one.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  So, so first of all, this was a retainer I put on the top of my, top of my mouth. Yeah. That stimulated chewing stress and very gently opened up the, the roof of my mouth because it had been so small for so long. So oral pharyngeal exercises. Here's the easiest one. You see how I'm going to get around this? It's just closing your mouth. You want your tongue to always be on the roof of your mouth. You don't want it to be down below sloshing around on your teeth.

• 1:11:55Lewis Howes?

  All the time in general?

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:58Lewis Howes?

  Really? So you want to be holding it up there almost gently?

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  That it should naturally be doing that. The front teeth should almost be touching. If the front teeth are lightly touching, that's fine. So you're going to notice when your mouth is closed and the tongue is at the roof of the mouth, the tongue goes up, the airway opens. If you open your mouth, the tongue rocks back and the airway gets smaller. So if you're constantly having shutting your mouth, I can't quite demonstrate shutting my mouth while I'm talking to you. So that is the number one thing you can do. After that, you can do something that a myofunctional therapist just taught me. You're gonna get it now. Are you happy?

• 1:12:39Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  But it's called the cave, and this is doing this.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  So I'm putting the tongue on the roof of my mouth, and I'm sucking it up there.

• 1:12:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  And, and don't overdo it. Start with a few seconds, and you can do that throughout the day. And another one you can do-

• 1:13:00Lewis Howes?

  What does that do? What does the cave do? Do you putting that on the front of your teeth, or more on the top of the roof?

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Right. The front of the tongue should just be touching the back of your teeth. So this is strengthening the tongue, right? It's getting it more, more elastic and strengthening-

• 1:13:15Lewis Howes?

  Five seconds at a time, 20 seconds?

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  You can do, you can hold it for, for 30 seconds if you'd like. But another one, this is also known as mewing, even though it's just oral faryngeal exercises, is using the back of the tongue,

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  and putting it to the back of your palate and sort of moving your tongue forward, so that the tip of your tongue reaches the back of your teeth.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Like that.

• 1:13:43Lewis Howes?

  So from the back of your throat, almost, as far back as it can go, and then pushing it forward on the top of your mouth, like-

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  You will feel the muscles right here. When you do this. And when you're doing this, you are tensing those soft tissues. You're just working them out. And there's some other tricks. I'll forward you the paper from-

• 1:14:02Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  Guess Journal, which is an esteemed journal. This is where this stuff was published, and very effective for snoring and sleep, for some people with snoring and sleep apnea.

• 1:14:11Lewis Howes?

  Do you speak Spanish, any chance, James?

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Un poquito.

• 1:14:17Lewis Howes?

  For 20 years, I've wanted to learn Spanish and one of my theories on why I think it's more challenging than it probably needs to be. It's because I've never been able to learn how to roll my Rs. And part of me is wondering, is it because I have a smaller mouth? Is it because I just, I can't use my tongue the right way? Is it because, I don't know. Has this ever come up where people can roll their Rs? Uh, in a certain way with the language, whether it's Spanish or another language. Based on breathing, strengthening the tongue, you know, working it out. Is this something that you've seen?

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I've never been asked. Um, and I have no idea just from. An anatomical perspective, it makes sense to me. If your tongue is not aligned with your lower jaw, if your tongue is flopping around, if you see teeth imprints on your tongue. When you hold it up. Then your mouth is too small for your tongue and makes you more apt to have airway issues. How that relates to. Languages like Italian or Spanish or Portuguese. I'm not sure, but, but a great.

• 1:15:30Lewis Howes?

  It's a good, that's a good thing for you to research next and let me know if you find any research.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  Book.

• 1:15:35Lewis Howes?

  How to roll your Rs.

• 1:15:38Lewis Howes?

  Are, are you able to do that? Just curious. Do you know how to roll the Rs?

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  I sound terrible when I do it, but I try and you always get this sort of snicker of sympathy, which sort of. Allows you to get away with a bunch of stuff. So I'm a terrible Spanish speaker, but. I'm in California, right? And I grew up in Southern California. So we were just down there all the time. As long as you try, man, that's all they want.

• 1:16:02Lewis Howes?

  I was a, I got you. Sure. It's just my personal, personal curiosity. Uh, with. The mask wearing in the global pandemic. Is there a way to develop better breathing techniques to help people breathe better in masks?

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  So what people are reacting to when they have a mask on. Is they're not reacting to a lack of oxygen. You see these people walking around saying, oh, I'm anxious. I panic. I can't breathe. I'm not getting oxygen. That is almost always never the case. What they're reacting to is that increase of carbon dioxide. So when you have a mask on, you're breathing slowly. And there is a little backdraft of CO2. And CO2 is the thing that makes us need to breathe, just as we talked about earlier. It's funny hearing people and even hearing people on the street who say, you know, there's no way I'm getting enough oxygen. I'm not wearing this thing. All you need to do is buy one of these.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  It's about 15 bucks on Amazon, or you can buy it at your local store, whatever. This is a pulse oximeter. And you put your finger in here and it shows you your blood stats. Okay. There's been numerous studies that have shown, no matter what mask you're wearing, I'm sure there might be some 20 ply mask that might make it really hard to breathe. But all the masks that most people are wearing right now, this is not an oxygen problem. It's an increase of CO2. As we mentioned earlier, having more CO2 in your body, as long as you have healthy levels of oxygen can be very beneficial. We're just not used to it, so we think it's unhealthy.

• 1:17:40Lewis Howes?

  It can be beneficial. Yeah, that's interesting. And are you finding it comfortable when you're breathing through a mask? Is it not bothering you? What's your personal take on how you're doing it through the nose?

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  I take this as an opportunity to focus even more on my breaths and to breathe slowly. If you don't want to smell your garlic breath, if you've just eaten some pizza for lunch or whatever, then why would you want to keep breathing 20 times a minute? Why not breathe six times a minute? Really slow down your breathing and allow your body to calm down and function better. So San Francisco was one of the first cities to shut down. Everyone's wearing masks here. And I actually don't mind the mask. I'm a weirdo because I've checked myself. I've checked my blood stats. My oxygen's just fine. It's that increase of CO2.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  And knowing that there is extra vasodilation, more circulation with an increase of CO2, I look at this as a benefit in some ways.

• 1:18:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Is it possible to reverse aging if we learn to breathe better? Can we become younger? Can we live longer because of our breathing techniques or strategies and way of being?

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  You're gonna be skinny. You're gonna look great. You're gonna get that leading part in a movie. Everyone, all you gotta do is free. No, uh, really. It is one.

• 1:19:02Lewis Howes?

  Around, is there science around it for living longer, though?

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely, there is. If, if you look at lung capacity. So, um, so we're, we had talked about this before. One of the leading markers of, of death. Okay, is when you lose respiratory health and when you lose lung capacity even more than, than genetics. So lung size.

• 1:19:25Lewis Howes?

  When they shrink and you can't breathe, how are you gonna survive?

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Lung, lung size is a very accurate marker for lifespan.

• 1:19:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  This, this was a study they did about 30 years ago. Um, part of a longitudinal, uh, study that's been going on for 70 years. And they found that lung size and respiratory health. And it's amazing, like, you can't do anything about your genetics, right? But you can do something about your breathing and you can do something about your lung capacity. You can really focus on that and show some substantial differences.

• 1:19:58Lewis Howes?

  What is the, is there studies or research around? How many years you could potentially extend based on the size and capacity of your lungs?

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  There's not because everyone's different. Everyone's a different age. But, but I, this was a pretty interesting study I found. It didn't make it into the book. My editor said, this is just too weird. But one researcher looked at people who had had double lung transplants. And those people who have been transplanted with larger lungs.

• 1:20:26Lewis Howes?

  Shut up.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Significantly longer.

• 1:20:28Lewis Howes?

  Shut up. Than what?

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Than people who had their original size or smaller significantly longer. So those references are available for free on my site if you don't believe me.

• 1:20:43Lewis Howes?

  That's amazing. So, okay, so if you want to live longer, increase the capacity to breathe deeper and bigger lungs.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Don't go out and get a lung transplant if you don't have to, people. We have this incredible machine called the human body that really responds to the inputs we put into it. So you can hone this thing if you just spend a little bit of time, a little bit of focus. And I, I just want to, I realized I was being a smart ass before. Breathing isn't going to do everything for you, right? Either is eating well, either is exercising, but it has to be considered with these other things. It has to. A lot of us know that eating crap food is going to make you feel crappy. It's going to shorten your life. It's going to make you more susceptible to disease. Same thing with exercise. Who's talking about breathing?

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully more people. Our ancestors were for thousands of years, but I see that wave starting to really come up now and, and a lot of scientists and researchers are very excited about exploring this further.

• 1:21:45Lewis Howes?

  Is it expanding the rib cage that we need to do or more making it more flexible so we can breathe in and out deeper? What is the thing we need to do?

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  Your muscles like flexibility. Your mental capacity likes to be flexible. Your respiratory system likes to be flexible. Your ribs want to be flexible. Your intercostals want to be flexible. So if you look at these freedivers, these are people with these enormous rib cages, right? But they can also exhale all that air out, right?

• 1:22:19Lewis Howes?

  Gosh, man, that's super expansive.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Here's, here's how you can tell if you're engaging your diaphragm when you're breathing, because sometimes this is confused with just belly breathing. You see these people, they're just like, I'm breathing healthy and they're just sticking their stomach out. Take your hands like this and place them just above your hip bones, right? And take a breath in through your nose and you want your hands to move out, okay? You don't want them to move forward. You want them to move outward laterally. And when you breathe that way.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Just real calmly, that shows that you're allowing that diaphragm to go down and gently push outwards. Okay, so that that's a healthy breathing. A lot of people are just focused on the stomach, but you're just using stomach muscles there. You want your your body, just as I said before, everything in the body wants to be moving softly, like your blood wants to be coursing softly through through your veins, lymph fluid wants to be moving, muscles want to be flexible and they want to be moving. And I would consider the diaphragm the most important muscle in the entire body. Because if it goes out, or if you are losing function there, everything's going to go to hell. Your health is going to go to hell.

• 1:23:36Lewis Howes?

  Oh, uh, okay, I've got two final questions for you that I ask everyone at the end of my interviews. Before I ask them, I want to make sure people get the book Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. They can check it out on your website, on Amazon, everywhere. And best website for you is mrjamesnestor.com. You're also on social media, MrJamesNester on Instagram. You've got a lot of great little short bits there on Instagram that I really like watching. So make sure you get the the book. And one of my final questions is called the three truths question. So I want you to imagine a hypothetical situation that because you've mastered the art

• 1:24:19Lewis Howes?

  of breathing, you've extended your life for as long as you want to live. And it's the last day for you, though. It's got the last day of your life. It could be 100 years from now, whenever it is. But you've accomplished everything you set out of your life to be. For whatever reason, you've got to take all your body of work with you, all of your content, books, interviews, they got to go with you. So no one has access to your written audio or video words anymore. But you get to leave behind three things you know to be true, the three big lessons you would leave and share with us, what I like to call three truths. What would you say are those three truths for you that you would share?

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  Let's say never underestimate the capabilities of your body. Okay. If someone tells you something is impossible, go prove that it's not. And I think the third one is ambition is the last refuge of failure. And what I mean by that is to sit around and try to do something and hem and haw, that's not the way to do it. You just do it, then you don't have to have ambition. You're already on the train, you're already moving forward.

• 1:25:28Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Love that. Those are powerful truths. James, I want to acknowledge you for a moment before I ask the final question for, for taking a deep dive into something that I think is affecting billions of people around the world that don't have the tools and the science of understanding this. I'm, I'm very grateful that you're popularizing this in a mainstream, especially in America, so that we can understand it more for those who maybe haven't been trained in other philosophies where they learned this growing up. And I think it's a lot of the, a lot of the causes of pain, stress, anxiety, mental disease can be solved or helped through understanding these practices in a major way.

• 1:26:11Lewis Howes?

  So I acknowledge you for studying this, for researching it, for finding practical ways for us to apply it in our lives. Very powerful, the work you're doing, and I appreciate your work. Final question for you. What is your definition of greatness?

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Flexibility.

• 1:26:27Lewis Howes?

  There you go. James Nestor, my man, thank you so much for being on, I appreciate it.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  Thanks a lot for having me, really, really appreciate it.

• 1:26:38Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Make sure you share it if you enjoyed it. Again, think about someone you care about in your life. Send them this link, lewishouse.com/1060, because you have the power to help inspire and transform someone's life today by paying this forward. It's free. Just send them that link or copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this, on your podcast player. And if you are on Apple Podcasts right now, click on that subscribe button. If this is your first time here, just click on that so you can be notified of the latest and greatest interviews from the smartest and most talented minds in the world. So click that subscribe button right now on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review if you enjoyed the powerful information in this episode. When you do that, it helps us spread the message to more people. So if

• 1:27:23Lewis Howes?

  you care about spreading the message of greatness, then join the community and help spread the word with us. And if you want inspirational text messages from me every week sent to your phone, then shoot me a text right now with the word PODCAST to 614-350-3960. Again, just text me the word PODCAST to 614-350-3960 right now, and you'll get messages every single week to keep you on track with your life and your goals. And I want to leave you with a quote from Gregory Maguire, who said, "Remember to breathe. It is, after all, the secret of life." And I want to remind you that you are loved, that you are worthy, and that you matter. I'm grateful for you for being here today, for showing up, and of course, breathing with all that love that you have inside of you right now. You know

• 1:28:07Lewis Howes?

  what, Tom, it is, it's time to go out there and do something great.