Most Replayed Moment: Simple Breathing Techniques To Reduce Stress Fast! - James Nestor

James Nestor is a renowned expert on breathing and respiratory health. He is dedicated to uncovering the profound effects of proper breathing on mental and physical well-being. In today's moment, James Nestor delves into the crucial connection between lung capacity, stress and overall health. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/sE19jnXPDVb Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/D1g9W02PDVb Watch the episodes on YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a correlation between our health outcomes, how long we'll live and our lung capacity, our VO2 max and all of that stuff? Is there a correlation there?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  So I had the same question years ago and I started looking into it. And it turns out that numerous studies have found that the healthier and larger your lungs are, the longer you will live. That is the greatest indicator of lifespan was lung size and lung health.

• 0:33Steven Bartlett?

  The greatest indicator.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  The greatest indicator. According to these studies, the Framingham study looked at 5,200 people over the course of 70 years. And they found that the people who lived the longest had the largest and healthiest lung function. They even did studies in which they were looking at people who had lung transplants, surgically implanted lungs. Those who were given larger lungs lived way longer than those given normal size or smaller lungs. So no matter how you get these larger lungs, it's better. And luckily, we don't need to get a transplant to do this. We can practice healthy breathing. We can practice stretches. We can exercise and this naturally can keep our lung size up.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  It's very sad when you start looking at these charts of what happens after you're 30, you're almost there, so get ready, it's a real bummer. But your lung function starts dropping off very quickly. And especially for women, around 50 and 60, your lung function and your lung size starts shrinking, shrinking, shrinking up, which means at the time you need more oxygen more easily, it's much harder to get that. And that's where people's health really starts disintegrating. They start having problems. The good news is you can stave off this deterioration, this shrinking of your lungs by doing all the stuff we're talking about, by doing breath work exercise, by exercise.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  What is yoga but stretching?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  And breathing into this lung and breathing into that lung. So the yogis knew this thousands and thousands of years ago.

• 2:13Steven Bartlett?

  And it's that it almost feels like that downward spiral is kind of self reinforcing and self fulfilling because if my lung capacity deteriorates, my movement and my exercise capacity will deteriorate, which means my lung capacity will deteriorate, which means I'll move less, which is kind of this downward spiral, right?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And it's my belief after studying this stuff for so long that that is the thing you want to pay attention to more, more than anything else, especially as you grow older, your lung function, how much air you can pack into your lungs, how long you can hold your breath. All of this is indicative of your general respiratory function and your general health. So that, that little hint of using a breath hold every morning to see where you are physically and mentally, I think is good. They've used it for thousands and thousands of years and now it's coming back. This is something that a lot of these longevity experts aren't looking into. They're looking into nutrition and

• 3:12Speaker 01

  exercise. They're not looking into lung capacity. We get more energy from breath than we do from food and drink, right? We take 30 pounds of air in and out of our lungs every single day. And so I, I, I find it interesting. They're focused on all these micronutrients. All that stuff's important, right? I believe most of it. But from what I know, a lot of them aren't focused very much on their breathing.

• 3:38Steven Bartlett?

  Want to make sure that I have something to, that I can take into my own life there for the expansion of my lung capacity because I'm sold on the importance of it. So, um, exercise expands my lung capacity.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, 15, 20%, just, just by exercising, by virtue of actually, if you're a good exerciser, your lung capacity will, will stay up.

• 3:57Steven Bartlett?

  Cardiovascular exercise.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Cardiovascular exercise. And there's ways to access that a little more. If you're dysfunctionally breathing when you're working out, you're not doing yourself too many favors. So you have to remember the simple, basic things. You have to learn how to take a proper breath, then apply that to your workouts. You will see such an incredible difference once you do this. This is what yoga's good for. It's harder to yoga without breathing well, right? You can do it, but by virtue of all those different poses, they're meant to open up your chest, right? To expand this area.

• 4:31Steven Bartlett?

  So yoga, cardiovascular exercise with proper breathing through my nose, breathwork practices at the start of the day.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  I think biomechanics, the first thing is awareness to any of this stuff. You can take your hands. We can do this while we're seated here. You can put it above your sit bones here.

• 4:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  And when you breathe in, breathe very, very low and you want your hands to move out laterally. I don't care what your stomach's doing, moving out laterally. So as you breathe in.

• 4:57Steven Bartlett?

  When you say low, you mean in my belly?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  You want your hands to be moving outwards. Okay? I don't care what's happening with your lung, with your stomach. I can hold my breath and move my stomach in and out. So when people talk about a belly breath, that's not what we're doing. When your hands are moving out laterally, that means your diaphragm is descending. That's how we can see if you're taking a proper, deep breath. So as you breathe in, you want your hands to be moving outward. And if you take a cloth measuring tape, you can actually measure your progress this way. The next thing you want to do is take your hands, okay? Take your four fingers, place them on your collar bone and put your, this one's very weird. Place your middle finger right there. So it's only your

• 5:41Speaker 01

  middle finger that's touching. Okay? And we're going to breathe deep, then we're going to move that breath up into our chest. Okay?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Don't move your shoulders.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  You want to see those fingers naturally separated. Okay? So this is not a flexing thing. Your shoulders stay down.

• 6:02Steven Bartlett?

  Like this?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Just like this, fingers on the collarbone. We're going to take a big breath into our lower abdomen area. Move it up.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  And you want your chest to be expanding outward. The last thing we want to do, take your hands and put them, especially you, you need to do this. Take your hands, put them around your neck.

• 6:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  I want you to do that same breath. You should feel zero tension in your neck. There's none of this going on. Okay? It should feel soft and supple. So let's take that belly to the chest breath.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  If there's any tension, do it again until there's no tension.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Okay, now try that again, keeping your shoulders down. Okay, do not move your shoulders up. There's none of this going on. You're very soft, very relaxed. Take your hands above the hip bones. When you're breathing in very deep, those hands should be out like this, like wings.

• 7:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Okay? And you're going to breathe in deep and those hands should be moving out laterally.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  You will start to feel those organs getting compressed. That's good. You want that. Then you can move it up one more time. So we're going to start low and we're going to move that breath up to the chest.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Keep your shoulders down. Try it again. Keep the shoulders down.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  There you go. And those fingers should be separating. So this is something that you can check in if those hands are moving out laterally. If those hands are separating on your chest, you are taking a proper biomechanical breath.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  And that's what you need to focus on. And you'll notice, once you start learning how to access these different areas, you start applying this to working out and your performance will tend to go up. You'll be less exhausted at the end. You'll just feel better all around.

• 8:15Steven Bartlett?

  So we should expect our chest to come, kind of move outwards as we breathe in?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  You, you want to see your chest moving outwards because most of your lungs, the expansion is in your back, but some of that is going to be happening. This is not a pose that you want to do like this, right? You should be very loose, very limber.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  And when you breathe in, you want that air to fill all the way up there, but you want to start low first. That means the diaphragm is descending. Most of the air that is soaked up from the lungs and that gas exchange happens at the bottom of the lungs. So you want to be able to access the bottom of those lungs.

• 8:55Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a certain way that I, because when you say you want to start by breathing at the bottom, is, how do I know, so the symptom of me breathing at the bottom is it coming out, my, my, my sort of, what do they call this, my abdomen coming outwards on the sides?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  That's right. Because everyone calls this a belly breath. So people do this with their belly, but you can move your belly independently of your breathing.

• 9:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  This is a way that you can't cheat. So a tape measure is good. And if you get an inch, inch and a half, that's pretty good. But you can work that up. And if you see really good breathers, people have practiced a lot of yoga and done it the right way, they can have this massive expansion. And this is what ties into freedivers. Freedivers are the experts at accessing every square inch of their lung capacity to fill it with air. And that's what they do, which is why if you ever see freedivers go to one of these competitions, they're short people, tall people, fat people, whatever, they all have these enormous chests because they've been able to develop this incredible lung capacity.

• 10:07Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things that I think causes shallow breath is this kind of constant state of fight or flight, stress, anxiety, screens, social media. And it's funny because whenever people would have been listening to this podcast and started, heard you talk about breath, and they would realize that they were probably at that exact moment doing really shallow breaths.

• 10:32Steven Bartlett?

  You talk about these freedivers who are able to extract, you know, eighteen, use eighty, ninety percent of their diaphragm or more. Well, you said we use ten, roughly ten percent.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  We use about ten percent and oftentimes less than that, the average person.

• 10:45Steven Bartlett?

  What is the correlation between like stress and breathing? And also, I'm talking now about like the everyday angst of life.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  So we've talked about the skeleton. We've talked about anthropology. We've talked about biomechanics and posture. But something else that ties into this, you're a hundred percent right, is psychology, is your brain. So how you breathe affects how your brain works, affects your anxiety, but your anxiety also affects how you're breathing. So again, it's another one of those circles. What happens so often is when we're at work, we're so sensitized to threats and to fear that we overreact when something happens. Even though it's not threatening our life, we get a nasty email from a friend or a email from the boss that's disappointed at the last project you did.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  And we get stressed out, right? And so what, what is the physiological response to stress is we clench up, we hold our breath, and then we breathe like this.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  And we hold our breath again, and we breathe like this. You think about thousands of years ago, when we were out in the wilds, what would we do if there was a threat approaching? You'd hold your breath to be silent. And then you breathe too much, get your respiratory system ready to either fight it off or to run away. So we're having the same response in our day to day lives now because we're so oversensitized to it. So researchers have different names for this. They call it email apnea or continuous awareness. I mean, there's an academic name for it, partial attention syndrome. I prefer email apnea, easier to remember. No matter what you call it, it's the idea

• 12:38Speaker 01

  that when you're in the office place, you're breathing just fine. Because of this constant stress loop and they've found there was some NIH studies on this. They've found that breathing this way can have long-term damage to your health, high blood pressure issues, all the things we had talked about metabolic dysfunctions and more, which makes sense because you're just constantly in this loop of fear and threat and stress. So the quickest, most effective way, way more than drugs, to take control of this stress is to take control of your breathing. And this has been documented time and time again. So when you notice you're breathing this way,

• 13:18Speaker 01

  you stop. What I like to do is breathe two breaths in and then an exhale. Looks like this.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  That resets your respiratory system, that resets your breathing pattern. And then you can do a few rounds of that and go back to very simple five second in, five second out. So let's just pretend you're in line at the airport, someone's cut you off, you ordered something at Starbucks, they gave you the wrong, you know, all the things that are just drive us crazy nowadays. At that moment, I want you to breathe in, pause, breathe in again,

• 14:03Speaker 01

  let it out. Relax yourself a little bit when you're doing these breaths. Okay.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Breathe in again,

• 14:13Speaker 01

  and let it out. Do that one more time. Breathe in, little more subtle, let in again,

• 14:22Speaker 01

  and let it out. So you did this in a very exaggerated way, which is fine, but you can do this so no one can tell you're doing it. You can do it very subtle. You probably feel a little different now than you did before.

• 14:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, so much different.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  You can return to then a slow, low rhythmic breathing pattern from there, or whatever makes you comfortable. I like five seconds in, five seconds out. Also, what's beneficial for people, if it's comfortable for them, is four seconds in, six out will really mellow you out. And we could try that right now. Breathe in.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Okay, first of all, slow. I should not be seen.

• 14:59Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, you shouldn't see her, okay.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  We're gonna breathe in just very, very lightly. We're gonna relax here.

• 15:04Steven Bartlett?

  What does it matter if you see it?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Because you're trying too hard.

• 15:07Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  This is not, there is a time and place for the

• 15:12Speaker 01

  this is not it, okay?

• 15:15Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, right.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  So breathe in, two, three, four, out, two, three, four, five, six. Breathe in, two, three, four, out, two, three, four, five, six. Doesn't have to be that exact pattern, but this will trigger all of that parasympathetic response in your body. You can see this if you're looking at your heart rate variability. It's amazing to see the, the difference that this happens just after a few breaths. Look at, looking at your HRV, looking at your heart rate, looking at your stress levels.

• 15:56Steven Bartlett?

  What is it doing? You mentioned parasympathetic and resetting the respiratory system, but if I, you know, what is the parasympathetic and the respiratory system for dummies? What is that?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  So how you breathe is gonna activate your nervous system function. Your nervous system function is gonna activate everything in your body. So we can take conscious control of our breathing. We can't take conscious control of our heart rate or liver function or any of that. We can take control of our breathing. When we take control of our breathing, we can hack into our nervous system. So you can be in a sympathetic state, just like we were. You take a couple of those double inhales and exhales.

• 16:33Steven Bartlett?

  What sympathetic state?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Sympathetic state is the act, the fight or flight. This is the action part of your nervous system. When you're in this state, you are ready for action. And what happened, which is great, we want to be ready for action. We want to be ready to fight or run away from stuff. We do not want to be in this state all day long.

• 16:55Steven Bartlett?

  Anxiety, angst.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Anxiety, stress, because this is where autoimmune issues and so many other problems come from. By constantly staying stressed. We want stress, we want to be able to access stress for short amounts of time. Then we wanna flip back into this parasympathetic, this relaxing state. If you look at, once again, animals in the wild, even look at like a gazelle that's been attacked. You know, five minutes later, it's just sleepy. So it has a nervous system that's able to pivot from one to the other. Unfortunately, we live in an environment where we're always activating, always pushing towards that sympathetic and it's making us sick, really, really sick.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  So your breathing is the quickest way of taking control of acute stress. So pills work, okay, other modalities work, but in that moment is when you need the most help and your breathing is the thing that can get you there.

• 17:52Steven Bartlett?

  So people that have chronic stress must have awful breathing.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And they've documented that. They've looked at their breathing, they've looked at their carbon dioxide levels and carbon dioxide is indicative of how slow you're breathing. If your levels are very low, that means you breathe like this. So you're just off gassing all of this CO2 and they're always low, especially for anxiety and panic as well. They're always low, extremely low. You ask someone with acute panic or anxiety to hold their breath, this is usually what happens.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  I'm never doing that again. I've seen this hundreds and hundreds of times. So by breathing slowly, you're making them more comfortable with more CO2. You're making them more comfortable with their nervous system function with themselves, which is why this assessment of a breath hold is very useful and so important. It's not only a diagnostic, it's therapeutic. Because while you're holding your breath, you're also in the action of training yourself to tolerate more CO2, which will calm your body down.

• 18:59Steven Bartlett?

  And going back to this point about the parasympathetic and the nervous system and anxiety, why does having an extended exhale help with anxiety? So you said breathe in for four, breathe out for six. Why does extending that exhale by two seconds help with stress and anxiety?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  So if you really pay attention, and a lot of people have problems doing this, which is why it's helpful for them to look at their whoop or whatever, you can place your hand over your heart and when you inhale.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  You can feel your heart rate increase. When you exhale,

• 19:37Speaker 01

  it slows down. This is how HRV works. This is how it's calculated is the difference in time on that. The shortest distance to the longest difference. And this is looking at your nervous system function, respiratory sinus arrhythmia. So how you breathe affects how, how many times your heart beats. Right? So if you're exhaling, which slows the heart rate down more, what's going to happen to your heart rate? It's going to start slowing down more. And that exhale, that slowing down and telling your body, you're in a safe place that it can relax is what triggers this response by the nervous system.

• 20:15Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. So it's like tricking the, tricking the body into believing that.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  It's such a simple hack. And a lot of people, they say, oh, this can't be true. But so many of us have these wearables. You can check it for yourself and in real time to look at your heart rate variability, changing your breathing pattern. Look at your blood pressure too. For many people, they can just switch their breathing. After a couple of minutes, you can see drops of 15 points. Not for everybody, but for some people 10 to 15 points just by switching your breathing.

• 20:44Steven Bartlett?

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.