Pod Insights Modern Wisdom Change Your Breath, Change Your Life - James Nestor | Modern Wisdom Podcast 350 About this episode James Nestor is a journalist and an author.
We get more energy from our breath than we do from food or hydration or sleep. And yet most people have never considered assessing how properly they breathe. Thankfully James has spent years speaking to the leading researchers, breathwork teachers, monks and free divers in the world to find out what we need to know.
Expect to learn why computer use is affecting your breath, how poor breathing can cause diabetes, why snoring is a dangerous habit, James' tips for optimising your daily breathing, the best strategies to use for athletic performance, how to breathe better, the best breathwork exercises, how to improve your breathing while you sleep and much more...
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#jamesnestor #breathwork #breathing
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00:00 Intro
00:19 The Focus on Breathing & Sleeping
05:55 Breath's Impact on the Nervous System
09:41 Poor Breathing Patterns
14:57 James’ Breathing Eureka Moment
17:12 Tummo Breathing & Wim Hof
23:37 Breathing in Different Cultures
27:33 Why is Too Much Breath Bad?
33:55 Can Breathing Changes Heal Illness?
37:47 Improving Non-Conscious Breathing
40:30 Breathing & Athletic Output
51:10 How to Increase CO2 Tolerance
54:33 How to Fix Snoring and Sleep Issues
1:03:11 Extreme Breath Feats
1:10:30 What James Missed From the Book
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Transcript 13,275 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 I want to be very clear, breathing is not going to fix all of your problems, right? But what I have found is that when people have very dysfunctional breathing, when you start controlling your breathing and you breathe in a more efficient way, the body can come back into balance.
0:18 Chris Williamson? James, welcome to the show. How crazy has the last year been for you after your book came out? Because it feels like breathwork is everywhere at the moment.
0:27 Speaker 00 Well, I think it was a crazy year for everybody for so many different reasons. I mean, you put a pandemic on to a virtual book tour, on to me finally coming out of my closets after so many years of research and writing to be on the other side of the mic. And it's been complete and utter chaos, to put it mildly, but in all, almost all good ways. I'm very grateful for the attention and I'm very grateful that people have discovered breathing as a way to help improve their health.
0:59 Chris Williamson? Yeah, and you talk about how these insights of breathing have been around for a very, very long time, you know, thousands and thousands of years, but aren't still now super widely known. Isn't it crazy in the 21st century that we can still have gated information? That there's stuff that monks in monasteries somewhere know, but that the internet doesn't?
1:19 Speaker 00 Well, I think that if you look at medicine and if you look at so much of science, this is exactly the pattern it takes is in one culture, a group will discover something to be true. And then another culture where that group had no association with the previous group, they discovered the same exact thing. This is true with nutrition. It's true with exercise and it's certainly true with breathing. So it wasn't that surprising to see that we've had this huge blind spot because we've had huge blind spots in regards to so many other things, so many other very basic things that have to do with human health.
1:55 Chris Williamson? Yeah, we saw that with Matthew Walker's book, right? That Why We Sleep, why should a book about something that everybody does for a third of their life be so revolutionary?
2:04 Speaker 00 I was just talking with Matthew Walker a couple of weeks ago. I was lucky enough to interview him at a conference, our first conference since the pandemic has somewhat lightened up here in the US. And I was cracking up because when I first heard of that book, I said, you have to be kidding me. Oh, now some guy wants to teach me how to sleep. I sleep just fine. And then we realized that breathing and sleeping, both people expect them to be a default reaction, something that we don't need to think about. But then you look at populations across populations of people who are sleeping, people who are breathing dysfunctionally, and there is an epidemic going
2:47 Speaker 00 on on both of those fronts. And there's a lot of crossover, that Venn diagram between disordered sleeping and disordered breathing. And so, you know, these simple things, I think, get so ignored because they're so simple. And yet, just adopting the most basic, simple human habits can really enrich your your life on so many levels. And the science is very clear about that.
3:17 Chris Williamson? Yeah, very much. I think people are looking for the fancy new pill or the weird funky workout regime, the contralateral, single arm overhead press with a kettlebell balanced on one leg. Like, that's what people are after. They don't want to do deadlifts, bench press, and squats. The same with this. Like, what's the new biohacking tool that I can use to measure my HRV for whatever, whatever? Not, you just need to focus on breathing, eating, and sleeping correctly.
3:42 Speaker 00 Well, what I heard from so many researchers, including my father-in-law, who's a pulmonologist, and I heard this from from top-level people at Stanford and Harvard, they were all saying the same thing. They said, listen, There's no way to make money off of breathing. And that's one of the reasons why, this sounds very cynical, but if you think about it, it's true. And it's really hard to make money off of sleeping. Uh, you can make money off of sleeping pills, but as Matthew Walker made very clear is sleeping pills will put you unconscious, but they won't put you to sleep. All the restorative processes that happen in sleep are excluded when you're taking sleeping pills. So I think some of this is commercially driven and trust me, businesses are going to find a way of
4:27 Speaker 00 commercializing breathing. They're already finding a way of commercializing sleeping and some of those wearables I think are fantastic, by the way. But it, I think that now people are much more empowered to take their health into their own hands. Because we've been so let down by the current systems and we've really come to this point where people have been forced to understand what ATP is and understand how to really lose fat and understand how to really build muscle. Uh, because so much of what we've been told to eat, eat the Wheaties in the morning, eat your Cheerios has been just a complete lie.
5:03 Chris Williamson? You know what people say a lot, they call it a post-truth world. And it's kind of like that now. Have you ever seen the midwit meme? Do you know what this is? So you have a guy, so it's a meme and on one side you have this dude that looks a bit like a Neanderthal with the, with the brow. And then on the other side, you have a guy that looks like a sage with his hood up. And then in the middle, you have this sort of screaming internet sort of one entrepreneur. And it talks about the, uh, the IQ curve, the bell curve. And it talks about the fact that the simpleton and the genius do the same thing. And you need a particular level of, um, intellect in the middle to actually get confused and get caught up in the weeds. And it kind of seems to be the same here that you go through this period where maybe there's too much information, the information that's out there is trying to hack the wrong things.
5:48 Chris Williamson? And then after a while you just get back to like eat, sleep, move, breathe, like, you know? Is it, do you think it's fair to say, this is something I've been thinking about. Is it fair to say that breathing is the most sort of direct window into our autonomic nervous system that we have?
6:04 Speaker 00 Without a doubt, we get most of our energy from air, from our breath. People say, well, how is that possible, right? We get most of our energy from food and drink. Not true. If you look at how we make energy, we get most of our energy from our breath. And so if you think that how you're inhaling 20,000 times a day, how you're exhaling 20,000 times a day is not going to make a difference in your energy levels and how your body operates, that efficiency of how you get that energy. You're crazy. And you know, this stuff is so simple. It's not very sexy to a lot of people. They said, well, I don't want that.
6:46 Speaker 00 I want something that, you know, I have to, I mean, look at what we've done with nutrition. It's nutrition isn't that complex. And yet for the past 50 years, it's, I need this vitamin. I need K2, I need my D3 right now. I need my fiber because I don't get enough fiber. I need this mineral because I'm deficient. I mean, this is insane. Or you could just eat foods that we're designed to eat, and you don't need any of that stuff. So breathing is similar in some ways because we're so removed from the natural environment. Hunter gathers don't need breathing reeducation, right? They don't need sleeping reeducation. They don't need nutritional reeducation. They are already doing that because they're in a natural environment.
7:31 Speaker 00 And the further we get away from a natural environment, the more patches we need to just keep our bodies sustaining. And we've gotten so far into an industrialized, modern living environment that we've had to reacquaint ourselves with the most simple things, movement, breathing, sleep. And you can see what a difference these things make to your life and overall wellness.
7:56 Chris Williamson? It's really weird, isn't it? Because we can't, I can't make myself digest any quicker or any slower. I can't make my pancreas secrete things if I want more. Is there anything else? I was trying to think, is there anything else that we can actually impact with regards to the sort of rest and digest system other than our breathing?
8:17 Speaker 00 So you're you're right, we can't take control of our kidney function, right? Just with your brain, you can't take take control of your your the amount that your heart is beating, right? Per minute. But when you breathe in certain ways, you can control and influence all of these different functions and even our organs. You can actually influence how you're digesting food. You can influence your kidney function. You can influence your liver function. You can influence your heart rate. If you don't believe me, take an inhale to a count of about three and then take a very long exhale to a count of about eight. Do that a few times and feel how your heart rate lowers, right? Your blood pressure is going to likely go down as well. This is magical voodoo stuff. No one would believe that we would have
9:02 Speaker 00 the ability to control this. The autonomic nervous system is called autonomic, as in automatic, beyond our control. And yet we can immediately affect it and influence it by impacting and controlling our breathing. And what's so great about this is you don't have to take subjective markers. You can measure what happens. Within a few seconds, your body responds to breathing. If all that magic is going to happen after a few seconds, what's going to happen if you breathe in a healthier way after a few weeks or a few months? Well, we're seeing these these people are able to overcome these chronic illnesses they've had for years and years.
9:42 Chris Williamson? All right, so if you were going to instruct someone to breathe as poorly as possible, what would you direct them to do?
9:49 Speaker 00 I would direct them to sit in front of Zoom all day, uh, hunched over and get stressed out about emails. And then when they get up, uh, they're going to do their 30 minutes of jogging a day, right? So they're going to put on their sneakers. They're going to go out and they're going to breathe like this as they're jogging. And then at night, you know what they're gonna do? They're gonna go to bed, they're gonna put their head on a pillow, and they're gonna immediately open their mouth and breathe through them, open mouth, all night. So what I'm, the portrait I'm painting here is obviously the majority of the modern human population. And we're breathing in ways that are so dysfunctional, that are causing so much damage to our bodies on so many different levels. So,
10:34 Speaker 00 I mean, I'm just being a little jokey about this, but it's actually true. There is even, you know, a whole field of study looking into something called email apnea, continuous partial attention syndrome. Because people, when they sit down and get stressed out, their breathing goes to hell, okay? And something like eighty percent of office workers suffer from this, so.
10:55 Chris Williamson? How's that characterized email apnea?
10:57 Speaker 00 It's characterized by you opening up your email, and you becoming so overwhelmed and so stressed so immediately, and your threshold of stress is very, very low, right? Uh, because we're not running away from tigers anymore, so everything is stressful to us. Oh, I'm watching The Bachelorette and she's not going with this guy, I'm totally freaked out. So, I mean, I, I'm not trying to be jokey, I mean, this is, this is what is happening to our society, so. When you start your day off that way, what do you do? What is the, the body's reaction to fear?
11:35 Speaker 00 You hold your breath, or
11:38 Speaker 00 you breathe too much. So our threshold for fear is so low that we get a nasty email from our boss. What that triggers is the same reaction that our ancestors had to hiding from a bear, or hiding from a saber-toothed tiger. We're doing the same thing. And that's fine to do for a short amount of time, that's why we're still around today, right? To be able to respond this way. But to do that all day long is gonna trigger this constant IV drip of stress, and what are the vast majority of modern chronic diseases tied to? Stress and chronic inflammation, almost all of them.
12:19 Speaker 00 So breathing ties into this. How you breathe influences your levels of inflammation and stress. We know that to be true.
12:27 Chris Williamson? So interesting thinking about how, because the biggest threats that we come up against now are downregulated, we're in such a safe environment, that our bodies can't tell the difference between a bad email or an upcoming awkward conversation with our spouse and being chased down by something that was life threatening. Like, anybody that's had a really, really nervous period at work knows just how overwhelming that sensation is. You're like, oh my god, like, is my body even capable of creating this much anxiety and concern? And then when you look back on it, you think, god, what was even, it feels like you were in some sort of a trance. It feels like you were under hypnosis or something.
13:07 Speaker 00 Well, I think it's, you nailed it right there, is our worlds have become so controlled. The climate is controlled no matter where we go. The light is controlled no matter where we go. And the more controlled and coddled you get, the less receptive you can be to actual threats. What's interesting is we've moved so far away from nature and actual threats, that when people are confronted with situations in which they really need to react like this, right, in order to survive, what do they do? They completely shut down. So, so those reactions that enabled
13:47 Speaker 00 us to live in jungles and savannas for millions of years are no longer useful, and they're a hindrance to our health. And just like anyone can, who's worked in an office, who's worked with nasty bosses, even good bosses and coworkers, there are times when you are stressed where you can't sleep right, you know? Oh, I don't feel like eating. You know, when, when you're in this state, your blood sugar goes up, your adrenaline goes up, your cortisol goes up, you can't rest and restore. So this isn't controversial, everyone knows this, but what do we do about it? We, we resort to pills and powders, some of which can work really well, okay? Some supplements
14:28 Speaker 00 can work really well. But why not use something that you carry with you all day long and all night long, that will allow you to immediately take control of that stress? And that's, that's what breathing allows you to do. I know this sounds like I'm overbilling this, but it- Get some instruments, get a heart rate variability monitor and breathe in a certain pattern and see what happens to your heart rate variability or your, your blood sugar or your blood pressure and more.
14:56 Chris Williamson? What was the moment when you went from being a skeptic to a believer? Was there a particular piece of research that you came across or an experience that you had where you went, okay, there's, there's really something to this and it's now undeniable?
15:10 Speaker 00 I would not call myself a believer. I always want to remain a skeptic and I still am. I mean, after all, journalists were supposed to be skeptics. I mean, that's what I, back in the old days, that was your job is to go in without any preconceived notion of something, without any bias. And it's so hard to find that. And so as someone who is a journalist and grew up in that world, I want to approach things and look at all sides. Why wouldn't I talk to everyone I could possibly find when I'm researching a subject? Yeah, there's a lot of doctors and researchers, but there's also a lot of clinicians and therapists
15:55 Speaker 00 who have worked with people for 30 years and they have something valuable to share as well. So, you know, I think this book took me so long because I did not believe what I was finding for so many years. And this is true, even though this stuff was coming out of Harvard and was coming out of Stanford and I was talking to these experts in the field, it took me years and years before I convinced myself and then I had to convince my publisher, my agent. I said, I think this is, I think this is real. And they said, no, no, no, for another couple of years until I finally had enough scientific studies and enough interviews and I gave them audio files. I said, well, don't listen to me.
16:39 Speaker 00 This is straight from the person who studied this for 40 years at one of the top institutions. This stuff is real. And so it was a progressive thing for me. I would understand and how mouth breathing was really that bad for you after doing all of the research and the science and some studies of myself. And then I would go on to the next thing. And finally it got to be so weird, like you can really heat your body up with breathing? Well, there's the study done at Harvard, you know, if you don't believe me, look at the videotape from that study.
17:12 Chris Williamson? Tell us about that. Tell us about that heating up study.
17:15 Speaker 00 So this was something that I kept on the back burner for a long time because I didn't want to approach it because it seemed so crazy. Whenever I told anyone about this, including my people in my family who are doctors, they said, "This is impossible." So it's this, this process, this breathing technique called tummo that has been practiced for at least a thousand years in Tibet. Before that, it was practiced by ancient Hindus. And what it is, is using your breath and using meditation to heat up your body. And there are stories that date back hundreds of years of travelers going to India, going
17:56 Speaker 00 to the Himalayas, going to Tibet, and seeing monks sit outside at night in the wintertime, melting a circle around them. So eight or nine hours with just a very thin sheet around, just breathing, melting a circle. Nobody believed this. Even when hippies were going to Tibet in the sixties, they would come back and say, "There's these people, they do this." So Herbert Benson, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, heard enough of these stories where he thought, "Maybe there was something behind it," or he was gonna bust this myth. So he went out to Dharamsala, the way a good scientist does, is goes out there
18:36 Speaker 00 with equipment, with sensors, sets up a study, and found out these people could do all of this and more. And there's videotape of the studies. You can read the study that was published in Nature, which is the most highly esteemed, peer-reviewed journal of scientific studies on the planet. And he showed that these people were able to raise the temperature in their extremities. By seventeen degrees, they were able to dry a wet sheet placed over them in a cold room in about forty minutes. And again, there's, there's video of this stuff. So it just shows you, when people actually show up, when researchers and scientists, scientists actually show up and do the research, you can really discover some amazing things.
19:19 Speaker 00 Unfortunately, there's just not that much money to be made in these kinds of studies. There's, there's no way to market tummo breathing.
19:28 Chris Williamson? You can't market monks drying your clothes by laying them on their back.
19:32 Speaker 00 You know, uh, maybe, uh, as, as a new washer dryer situation, someone can get a monk and, and put him, put him in the basement. That might be, might be cheaper. Feed him some rice. There you go. But you know, to, uh, Wim Hof has, has, he's done such an amazing service to people by taking these abstract, obscure breathing techniques, which he did not invent, and he is the first one to tell anyone that. And to make them approachable to everyday people. And so, what he practices is a form of tummo breathing, which is why he can sit in an ice bath for almost two hours and not suffer from frostbite or hypothermia. It's supposed to be totally impossible. There it is. There's the study of him doing that.
20:17 Chris Williamson? Are those monks the same ones that managed to heat? Was it different hands or different parts of the same hand or something?
20:24 Speaker 00 They're all using, these are all variations on the same theme. So that was Swami Rama, who grew up in more of a Hindu tradition. But what I tried to make clear in the book is we named these breathing techniques, different names. They were different cultures claim them as their own. But so many of them are all doing the same thing and they're eliciting the same effects. When you look at Wim Hof breathing and compare it to Sudarshan Kriya and compare it to other vigorous pranayamas, they heal people in the same ways because they're doing, they're eliciting the same reactions in the body.
21:00 Chris Williamson? What is that reaction? Have you got any idea what the mechanism is that's work? Like how? What's happening with the breath that causes the body to heat up or the hand to heat up?
21:09 Speaker 00 Well, this is where to me it gets very, very interesting. So if you take the Wim Hof approach, this very vigorous breathing,
21:17 Speaker 00 some of your listeners, I'm sure have, have done this breathing. This is eliciting a very severe sympathetic nervous system response. So it is stressing your body out. You get a squirt of adrenaline, you get some cortisol, some epinephrine. Like that's why your heart starts racing. You start sweating. You feel tense. In short bursts of time, This stress called hermetic stress or hormesis is so beneficial because just as we were talking about earlier, how we just stay all day in the state of chronic low-grade stress, this chronic state of inflammation. The short breathing techniques compound that stress so that you can chill out the rest of the time.
22:01 Speaker 00 That's why you're so relaxed after doing that. So that's how Wim is able to keep warm. What's interesting is that these monks were able to decrease their metabolism by sixty percent, which is way lower than someone in a coma. You should not be conscious, and yet they were able to heat their bodies up with this reduced metabolic state.
22:28 Chris Williamson? So what the fuck's going on there?
22:30 Speaker 00 Wim Wim Hof's method increases metabolism, which is why he says he consumes twice as much oxygen, even forty minutes after doing the Wim Hof method, right? So to answer your question, what the fuck is going on with these monks? We still don't know, which is what is so awesome about this. After so many years of testing these guys with every imaginable sensor, with every EEG, looking at their heart rates, looking at their body temperatures, looking at their blood pressures. We cannot understand how the human body, someone can take control of it, to reduce their metabolism, increase their heat. And on that same line, Swamirama, right?
23:14 Speaker 00 Here's a guy who on a single hand can increase the temperature on one side of his palm while decreasing the temperature by eleven degrees on his thumb. So on the same hand, still don't know, still don't know how they do it. Uh, that's what makes my job interesting is I get to fall into these worlds and try to figure it out.
23:37 Chris Williamson? These guys are freaks. Like this is insane.
23:40 Speaker 00 Well, I, you know, that's, that's an interesting uh perception because I think they view us as freaks.
23:48 Chris Williamson? For not having this capacity.
23:50 Speaker 00 Well, we all have this capacity. That's what they're saying. They're like, how dare you be born a human with this capacity to do these amazing things? And instead, sit in front of your computer and watch Netflix all day, eating popcorn, you know? How dare you not use your body to heat yourself up, to lose weight, to control your heart rate, to control your blood pressure? So that's, that's what I've learned and I've heard the same thing from freedivers. A lot of people call them freaks. These are these people who can hold their breath for six, seven, eight minutes at a time.
24:27 Speaker 00 And they can dive down to three hundred or four hundred feet on a single breath of air. I've seen it. I'm a freediver myself. I've experienced some of this. We're born with these mammalian dive reflexes that trigger the deeper we get in the water and you feel them coming on. And so people may look at freedivers as freaks, but freedivers think of other people as like, you're born with this. Everyone has this ability to dive and experience this true spectrum of, of life and, and what this body has given us. And so few of us do anything about it. So I guess it depends on what side of the uh argument you're on. But uh I, I guess I'm somewhere in the middle. I, I don't want to spend 12 years in a cave, learning how to do this.
25:10 Speaker 00 But I do want to tune in to some of what my body is able to naturally do for me.
25:16 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I guess that the perspective I have, like them bringing a freak is only relative to the fact that I'm a normal person. To the freak, the normal person just looks like someone that isn't maximizing their potential, I suppose.
25:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, talk to a Buddhist monk about how we're living, our, so many of us are living our lives in this extremely materialistic world where it's dog eat dog every single day. And, but we don't have a larger context on, on what life is. Hey, where did we come from? Where are we now? Where are we going when, when we die? So they view us as freaks and then we see monks sitting around meditating all day and we view them as freaks. So I don't think the answer is to go full bore into either of those sides. You can do that and that's great, but we have the luxury now in the modern age to be able to dip our toes in different things and see what works for us and what's really sustainable.
26:10 Chris Williamson? With that stuff, it feels like cultural conditioning masquerading as human nature. You just have a particular group of people and in that this is what's going on. And you think, well, everyone does this. Everyone thinks like this. Yeah, well, that's just a scope insensitivity that you've got going on there.
26:26 Speaker 00 Well, even closer to home, think about how people in the US and in Britain, I suspect, view this daily siesta. We're like, wait, what? You wake up, work a couple of hours in the morning, then you go home, eat lunch for two or three hours and go to sleep? And then come back for a couple more hours? We view them as people in the Mediterranean as complete freaks for doing this. But we know in Matthew Walker's book, when they've converted their lifestyles to the typical US or UK or North American lifestyle, their rates of cancer go way up.
27:06 Speaker 00 The rates of hypertension go way up, the rates of inflammation, the rates of sickness are off the charts now. So maybe it's we who are the freaks, you know? I don't want to get too deeply into that, but I really think it depends on context. And even more importantly, you can look at science and see what the human body really responds to, what the brain responds to, what is the healthiest and choose your path that way.
27:33 Chris Williamson? Okay, so going back to our poor test subject that you've given some instructions to and is now breathing in the worst way possible. You talk about them breathing too much. Why is too much breath a bad thing? I would have thought more breath would be good.
27:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, and a lot of people thought more food would be good, because more food equals more energy. So what's very confusing when you get into the biochemistry of breathing, and this took me months and months, I don't have a background in this stuff, which was a real hindrance, it was a pretty steep learning curve, is that you start to understand it's the efficiency of breath that is so much more important than the volume. So a lot of us think we want more energy, right? We want more oxygen, we need more oxygen to get more energy, so I'm going to breathe more, that allows me to get more energy. It's completely false. So the opposite is true. And we've known this for more than 120 years, that when you breathe, over breathe, over
28:30 Speaker 00 your metabolic needs, you offload too much carbon dioxide. And without getting too deeply into the weeds here, what that does is it inhibits blood flow throughout your body, and it makes it harder for you to get oxygen. You can see this for yourself by over, take 10 or 20 very deep breaths, and you'll feel some tingling in your fingers and in your head. That's from a decrease of circulation. So in order to get the optimum amount of oxygen, you should be breathing slowly, you should be breathing low, you should be breathing through your nose. By doing that, you are pressurizing that air, and you're allowing that air more time
29:12 Speaker 00 in your lungs to travel down deeper, where that gas exchange can happen so much more efficiently. You get more oxygen with less work and less wear and tear on your body breathing this way. And you can see this by feeling your heart rate when you breathe in these slower breaths. And then if you have a pulse oximeter, a lot of people do nowadays, look at your blood oxygen levels. If anything, they'll stay the same or often go up. So this is just simple mathematics, and yet we've gotten this so wrong for so long. And it's great that people are starting to correct this. And again, we have wearables that can show us and can prove to us how we're breathing,
29:57 Speaker 00 how efficiently we should be breathing in the future.
29:59 Chris Williamson? What is some of the health effects of poor breathing then? If someone doesn't fix the awful instructions you've given them?
30:06 Speaker 00 Well, look, look around, uh, look at the rates of asthma, look at the rates of panic disorder, look at the rates of sinusitis, of increased risk of allergies, increased risk of snoring, increased risk of sleep apnea, diabetes is tied to disordered breathing as well. I mean, this list goes on and on because if you're struggling or if you're doing anything inadequately all day long, all night long, guess what's going to happen? Your body can keep itself alive, that's good, but it can't keep itself healthy. So it really starts with stopping mouth breathing. Um, and this is the number one thing. Look at nature, look at any other animal in the wild, look at how they're breathing, right?
30:49 Speaker 00 They're breathing through their nose, look at an infant breathing deep into the belly, into the nose. So this is the very first step. And once you condition yourself to be breathing through your nose, you're a lot of the way there because that breath through the nose slows down, slows things down. It's hard to hyperventilate when you're breathing through your nose, right? So that takes care of a lot of those, those rules and regulations.
31:14 Chris Williamson? I got to tell you this story, man. So I had a guy called Stephen McGinty on the show. He's just written a book about the Pisces III submarine rescue, which is the deepest ever submarine rescue. It happened in about 1970. And these guys, Roger Mallinson and Roger Chapman, were stuck 15,000 feet down in a submarine for 86 hours on a bottle, uh, two bottles of oxygen that were meant to last them 60. So they were talking through the breath cycles that they needed to do. They were collecting the condensation from their breath on the surface to drink. They had oxygen tanks.
31:56 Chris Williamson? So what they were doing, and this was really, really interesting, they were purposefully alternating between breathing through their nose when they needed to make a decision and breathing through their mouth when they needed to conserve oxygen, because the mouth breathing was less efficient, but that's actually what they wanted. They didn't want to take as much oxygen in. They simply wanted to exist. So they tried to dial their breathing down to about six breaths a minute and breathe through their mouth. And then if they needed to do something, communicate with the surface, run the scrubber, run the O2 tanks, make a check on some sort of measurements. Then they breathe through their nose for a little while beforehand. The headache would abate a little bit.
32:40 Chris Williamson? They would have a little bit more cognitive function. They'd do the thing. They'd go back to breathing through their mouth quite slowly. I thought that was such an in-depth understanding of how breath works. And they stayed down there on this bottle of oxygen for a day and a half longer than they should have done. Crazy.
32:55 Speaker 00 It's that. That's a great story. And we know that nasal breathing affects how the brain works. So there have been numerous studies. There was one a couple of years ago out of Northwestern University that was fascinating, looking at rhythmic, slow breathing through the nose and how different areas of the brain will come online and different congregations of neurons will start lighting up in different areas to allow communication to work more fluidly between different brain regions. So the researcher said that actually breathing through the nose can help you make better decisions because it's changing the neurochemistry of your brain.
33:35 Speaker 00 And the fact that these guys knew about this in the 1970s is really impressive because a lot of the breathing research was coming out after that time. And you know, you don't have to tell them the importance of nasal breathing or or how the body responds to two different breaths. I mean, they experienced it firsthand and what an incredible story.
33:56 Chris Williamson? How does breathing fix the chronic health conditions that you're talking about? So I understand how it can cause things that are related to sinuses and airflow and stuff like that. But I less understand like inflammation and diabetes and things like that. I would have thought there would have. I don't know. I don't understand how it fixes it.
34:17 Speaker 00 So I want to be very clear, breathing is not going to fix all of your problems, right? I'm not going to offer anyone a blanket prescription for anything. No, I'm not going to do that. And I'm not a doctor, I'm not a breathing therapist. But what I have found is that when people have very dysfunctional breathing, when you start controlling your breathing and you breathe in a more efficient way, the body can come back into balance. I can get into a few of these specifics, let's just talk about asthma, okay? Populations with asthma tend to breathe way too much. They tend to breathe through their mouth, they tend to have very low CO2. So they have low CO2 because they are constantly over breathing,
35:00 Speaker 00 which is why a lot of people with asthma feel coldness in their fingers, okay? And guess what happens when you start over breathing? And you breathe more and more. You know that constriction I was talking about in blood vessels? Guess how asthma attacks start?
35:19 Speaker 00 You begin over breathing and that leads to this downward spiral of more over breathing can trigger an attack. The same exact thing happens with panic. So researchers did some incredible studies several years ago. This was NIH research, very official stuff. Where they took groups of people with asthma and panic, the only thing they had them do was breathe more slowly. That's it, okay? And they were looking at their CO2 levels. And they said they wanted to get their CO2 levels up, because when your CO2 levels are up, that's an indication that you're breathing in balance with your metabolic needs. Just by having them breathe more slowly, these people were able to reverse their asthma and reverse their panic.
36:03 Speaker 00 People were no longer having panic attacks or asthma attacks. You may think, oh, this is only one study. No, there are literally dozens and dozens of clinical studies that have been done at hospitals throughout the world just looking at breathing as an intervention for asthma and panic. So let's go to the other end of this. Let's talk about metabolism and breathing. You're like, how the hell could breathing be implicated in the onset of diabetes? Right? This doesn't make any sense. But we know this is true. When you go to bed at night and you have sleep apnea or sleep disordered breathing, what are you doing all night long?
36:48 Speaker 00 When you're breathing this way, you are stressing your body out, which is why people with sleep apnea and other sleep disorder breathing problems have hypertension. And it's also why when you're stressing out your body, every one of those times that you're holding your breath and stressing your body out, your blood sugar goes up, okay? Your insulin goes up. After a while, you get desensitized to that. And after a while, that can lead to adult onset diabetes. And this is not my research. This was studied thirty, forty years ago at Stanford. And you can look at sleep apnea and diabetes and find that there's, it's even directly connected with Alzheimer's, the onset of Alzheimer's.
37:30 Speaker 00 Because sleep is our time to rebalance the body and restore ourselves. Matthew Walker can tell you all about this. If sleep is the time when you're stressing yourself out, when you've been stressed all day, your body is going to be destroyed. And that's what we're seeing right now.
37:47 Chris Williamson? One of the things that I'm really interested to try and dig into is how much people can influence their non-conscious breathing with breathing exercises. So we can't spend every minute of every day thinking about our breath. We've got other stuff to do, you know, drive the car or feed the kids or answer the email or do the podcast. Is there some sort of a spillover effect that happens from focusing on your breathing that then makes your non-conscious breath pattern throughout the day improved? Have you got any idea of how this works?
38:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, so the point of this stuff isn't to be walking around with a notepad and wearing three different wearables and to be a complete neurotic about this. I already did it for you folks. It's not fun. I did it for years, did every imaginable study just to get a deeper view into this. Most of those studies didn't even make it into the book because I didn't want the book to be about me, I wanted it to be about the reader, the person who is breathing and reading. So what I've found is the point of these things is to train yourself, to acclimate yourself. To make healthy breathing a habit, okay? If you've been doing something dysfunctionally, breaking that habit can take weeks or months, can take a long time.
39:05 Speaker 00 But the key is to start very slow and to gently go into this. Don't kick your breath's ass. A lot of us in the West have this approach where we just want to go a hundred, a hundred percent, a hundred and ten percent into something. Save that for something else. With breathing, you want to slowly acclimate yourself so that it feels natural, so that your body can slowly respond to it. And that's what these breathing techniques do. And after a while, you won't need to remind yourself to breathe through your nose because you will always be breathing through your nose, including during exercise, okay? I'm living proof of this and the hundreds and hundreds of other people who've written me have found the same exact thing.
39:49 Speaker 00 For some people, they're lucky enough, after a couple of weeks, they're like, cool, I got this, I never breathe through my mouth. Others take a few months. If you're talking about jogging or doing zone four fitness, this can take a lot longer than that. But we know that the performance gains of nasal breathing and recovery times can be very profound. So the simple answer is, yeah. The point is to have these things become a habit. Sometimes that takes a while. At sleep, it's harder because you're unconscious, which is why I like some training wheels, sleep tape, nasal strips, nasal dilators can all help with that.
40:30 Chris Williamson? Let's get into the sports performance thing. There'll be lots and lots of people listening that are athletes and want to try and maximize their performance. What did you learn about breath's impact on athletic output?
40:40 Speaker 00 I learned that athletes are more concerned with efficiency than anyone, especially competitive athletes. That's what it's all about. Who can run most efficiently so you can beat your competitor, right? We've got 11 pounds of muscles operating our respiratory system. And so many athletes are focused on every other muscle. I'm going to work out my wrist today. And now I'm going to work out my neck and my ankles. You're not focusing on the muscles that are delivering energy to you when you're competing. And I think that this has been so chronically overlooked for so long, and now people are really cluing into it. So I will say that I've talked to some of the real leaders in the field. Brian McKenzie's a good friend. Patrick McEwen's a good friend.
41:23 Speaker 00 These are people who have been training elite athletes for decades. On the first thing they do is they have them breathe correctly. They said before anything else, that's what they start with. So what they've found, and there have been numerous studies on this, is performance will improve after you get over that hump of becoming a nasal breather. Your performance will go down at the beginning, and this is what a lot of athletes don't want to see. They don't want to see their performance go down. But once you acclimate, acclimate slowly, your performance by and large, and this is what they have told me with hundreds and hundreds of people that they've worked with, will improve, and then your recovery times will improve. Your VO2 max will likely improve.
42:08 Speaker 00 You can likely build more blood to more red blood cells. So you're able to do this because you're breathing in line with your metabolic needs. Most of us, when we're competing or working out, are breathing too much. That will trigger an excess of lactic acid, which will make it harder for us to recover. It will also trigger constriction in our blood vessels right at the time when we really need oxygen.
42:34 Chris Williamson? If this is correct, and it's more efficient for us to breathe slower through our nose, why does our body want to do anything else?
42:44 Speaker 00 Because our bodies are acclimated to have a very low threshold of CO2. So what they're finding now, and there's been a lot of research done on this in the past, but now, past, but now, there's a lot more interest in this. So what they're finding is that need to breathe is not dictated by oxygen, okay? It's dictated by CO2. Right now, if you exhale and hold your breath...
43:12 Speaker 00 You're gonna feel this nagging need to breathe after a while, okay? That's dictated by rising levels of CO2. And the more acclimated you get to being comfortable with more CO2 in your body, the more oxygen you can deliver to your hungry cells. So whenever you feel that, "I really need to breathe, I really need to breathe", over breathing is not gonna deliver more oxygen to you, okay? You wanna breathe in line with your metabolic needs, and that almost always is way slower than you think it is. Pulse oximeters can help do this. Breath-holding exercises can really help get over that hump, which is exactly why they're using so many of these for elite athletes.
43:57 Speaker 00 But don't take my word for it. Talk to the athletes who have converted to nasal breathing, who have adopted healthy breathing practices. And it's been a complete game changer for these people.
44:09 Chris Williamson? Did you watch Elliot Kipchoge's breaking two attempt? You see him sprinting toward the finish line? And the guys, I don't, I can't work out if his mouth is shut or not, but it's not far off, it's definitely not wide open. And he just looks, it's the same cadence, it's the same facial expression. The man's just zen. I wouldn't be surprised if he's a very, very heavy nose breather.
44:33 Speaker 00 Of course he is. So I wanna mention one thing, especially for the people who really like edging into that zone four, zone five level. There is a time and a place for everything. And this is what I've learned from Brian McKenzie, who works with elite Olympians. So if you're about to dunk on someone's head, like, it's okay to open your mouth, take a huge breath. If you look at Michael Jordan right before he's dunking, he takes this huge breath and dunks. That's perfectly fine, as long as you use that mouth breathing as a tool. Just like those people in that submarine, right? They're using their mouth breathing as a tool. A lot of people aren't used to,
45:14 Speaker 00 or even want to get to those elite states of athletic performance, which is why I don't mention this too often. But for those people who do, yeah, resetting with some mouth breath, if you've really reached your top.
45:29 Speaker 00 Go back to nasal breathing, totally fine. And if you look at Sandy Richards Ross, uh, who was the, the top sprinter for 10 years, check out her, um, crossing the finish line and everyone else behind her mouth breathing, mouth closed, breathing through her nose and Kipchoge is, is the same thing. It's okay to have your mouth open a little, maybe he's exhaling a little because he's been running for two fricking hours at 20 miles per hour. That's fine, but the majority of his breaths, I, I guarantee are nasal dominant. And something that joggers can do, if you have a heart rate monitor, if you have a strap, the straps are the most accurate by far.
46:12 Speaker 00 Check out your heart rate when you're nasal breathing versus mouth breathing and you will see your heart rate lower. And if you're able to perform at the same level of endurance with a lower heart rate, guess what you're doing? You're operating more efficiently and that means you then have more energy to go a little faster, to go a little longer. That's what athletic performance is, is based on efficiency and breathing has to be a huge part of this.
46:41 Chris Williamson? Brian McKenzie was on the show a couple of years ago and he said he could tell an athlete's performance simply by getting them to do a CO2 tolerance test. He had a very good indication of what this athlete was going to be like across a number of different domains by just getting them to do one slow breath from the top. Okay, you've got as much time as you want. Breathe in fully, breathe out, start the clock. As soon as you stop breathing out, I'm going to stop the clock. That was it. That's the only test that he needs. And on his, uh, state app, that's the regular retest that you do, right? As you continue to work up through it. So yeah, it's, it's so crazy. Here's, here's something else. So let's say there might be a lot of people listening that are maybe powerlifters, CrossFitters, they do sort of interval style work, perhaps other athletes.
47:26 Chris Williamson? How would you advise someone to recover in between sets? Because am I right in thinking that we've got the cadence, i.e. the, the speed of the breath and then the depth of the breath? Are those the two main, uh, characteristics, the two main sort of parameters that we're playing with when it comes to breathing?
47:43 Speaker 00 In between reps, I think nasal breathing is so important, but I also want to be very clear here. Once you have acclimated, truly converted to nasal breathing is where you're really going to see these benefits. At the beginning, some people may need surgery, okay? Some people do need surgery because their nose are so messed up, but a lot of people just need conditioning, just like you need conditioning with anything else. So, there's two different things I can talk about. Before you're conditioned, nasal breathe as much as you can, right? It's gonna be uncomfortable, but don't push it. Like, try it for maybe half of your breaths, or a quarter of your breaths at the beginning, then go back to your mouth breathing.
48:26 Speaker 00 That's fine at the beginning, that's what you've been doing, but then just gently start increasing it as you go along. It really helps to be nasal breathing at night. This will help condition all those tissues and different structures in your nose, and will help more easily acclimate your body to what you're doing in the daytime. Also, nasal breathing, wearing a little piece of tape while you're answering emails or doing stupid stuff around the house can really help condition you to nasal breathe. So, to answer your question, in between reps is absolutely when you want the heart rate to come down a little bit, you want your oxygen to go up and you want to recover. You don't want to be stressing your body out.
49:07 Speaker 00 I can't tell you how many times I used to see this at the gym, is people working out, doing a few reps, and then just, it was like this macho thing to walk around and go, like they're really working out. The same thing on a treadmill, on an elliptical, there's people just, you're not doing yourself any favors. If you want to burn more fat, you need more oxygen, which means you need to be nasal breathing more, and breathing in line with your metabolic needs. So, it's just basic biochemistry, but again, so few of us have heard about this until recently.
49:41 Chris Williamson? That's an interesting one. So, even though nasal breathing will reduce your heart rate, which most people would associate lower heart rate, less calorie burning, nasal breathing with lower heart rate will actually increase calorie burning?
49:55 Speaker 00 Your metabolic rate is going to be going up from lifting weights and your metabolic rate continues to go up after you work out, right? That's where you get the benefits from the fat burning. It's just not always during your, during the workout. It's afterwards. That, that's the real benefit of exercising. So if you're talking about burning fat, you need oxygen to burn fat and you can run anaerobically. You can do that for a while. It's extremely inefficient. It's an inefficient way to burn. You're burning sugar, that's cool, but you're also building lactic acid and, and causing, which is fine in, in small amounts, but, but it can cause problems late, later on.
50:37 Speaker 00 So you want that combination where you want to be working out into your zone three, zone four. You want the heart rate going up, but you also, this is what heart rate variability is, you also want it to be able to go down. You're, you're, and the benefits of that fat burning will be happening after as well. If you go on a three hour jog, it will be happening during that as long as your fat adapted and you're not just burning sugar, as long as your body can easily switch over to burning fat. And you need oxygen to do that. You also need proper food to do that.
51:09 Chris Williamson? One of the things I've just thought there, it feels uncomfortable, right? The CO2 tolerance is your, I tried to do it today. So I'm listening to the book earlier on today and I'm going for a jog and I'm right, James Nestor's listening, well, he's not listening, but he's talking to me. So it's kind of the same thing. Shut your mouth, like breathe, breathe through your fucking nose, come on. And I'm jogging along and you feel the discomfort and it rises and it rises and it rises and the air thirst to want to breathe more deeply through your mouth gets more and more compulsive. I've got to guess, based on how few people I've ever seen faint whilst running, that that is almost all psychological and very far, your physiological limit for how much
51:52 Chris Williamson? carbon dioxide you can tolerate and how much oxygen you need and how much more you need to breathe through your mouth is miles away from where your brain thinks it is.
52:00 Speaker 00 A yes and no, that depends on the person. People who are very tolerant for high levels of CO2 can push it too far, right? But then you have freedivers who are almost inhuman in their abilities. They've measured brain oxygen levels of 50% in a freediver. So this is so far below what is supposed to support consciousness, but and yet it does. So I can't give you a cutoff point. What Brian McKenzie does, what Patrick McEwen does, is they take you through interval training with breathing, right? And that's what freedivers do as well. When you're in a controlled environment, you're laying down on your couch,
52:42 Speaker 00 and you're just holding your breath for a minute at a time. Then you're holding your breath for a minute and a half at a time. Then you're breathing for 30 seconds and holding your breath. That's the best way to acclimate yourself to CO2. While jogging, I do not recommend, especially turbo people who really like to push it, to just hold your breath as long as you can and say, "I'm not. This is just psychological. I don't want to be responsible for you actually passing out."
53:07 Chris Williamson? Face planting the floor. Yeah, exactly.
53:08 Speaker 00 What you can do are these, this simple interval training where three seconds in, six seconds out, right? Four seconds in, eight seconds out. And maybe you do that, you start very lightly at the beginning. This is what I found really helped with my surfing and jogging, even though I hate jogging, and I try to do it anyway. Even walking, you can do this. Three seconds in, 10 seconds out. It's gonna feel uncomfortable. Then after a few days, or a few weeks, you're gonna be like, "Hey, I'm comfortable with this. I'm gonna push it a little more." This is the responsible way of doing it. And you're gonna notice something that I thought was fascinating, is you're gonna feel all this
53:52 Speaker 00 heat, all this warmth in like your fingertips, in the back of your neck. And this is circulation. This is a vasodilator. That's what CO2 is. It's all of this circulation. If your body has that circulation, it's able to process metabolites, it's able to deliver. Deliver oxygen, it's able to remove other toxins. You want that movement and that circulation and that's what this breathing allows you to do. So again, I would not suggest doing these epic breath holds while you're working out. But work on the inhale and exhale ratios. And play around with that and do it on a very softly and in a mellow way at the beginning.
54:33 Chris Williamson? Okay, so sleep. Is snoring natural or not?
54:38 Speaker 00 No, no, it's not, it's not natural at all. And it neither is sleep apnea. It just so happens to be that so many people do it, we think it's normal, just like having crooked teeth is not natural. Okay, we weren't intended to have crooked teeth. How many people have crooked teeth? About 90%, right? So there are some breeds of dogs that have been bred to have very flat faces. Guess what? They have the same breathing problems that that we have. But any other animal in the wild, the vast majority of the animals. They're not going to snore and they're not going to have sleep apnea. And according to the skeletal record, our ancestors very likely suffered from very little snoring and sleep apnea as well.
55:22 Chris Williamson? What causes snoring?
55:25 Speaker 00 Snoring is caused by this soft tissue in the back of the throat vibrating, right? So it it can happen as at the back of the nasal pharynx as well. Which is why some people breathe through their nose, they're like, hey, I'm still snoring. Cause it can happen back there. So that's from this flabby tissue. Sleep apnea is different, that's a blockage, usually your tongue.
55:49 Speaker 00 It can happen that way, it can also happen in in other areas, the oral pharynx, hypopharynx. But one of the leading reasons why so many of us suffer from snoring and sleep apnea. Beyond weight, which plays a huge role in this. But one of the leading reasons why people who are average weight or underweight can suffer from these things is our mouths have shrunk. Over the last few hundred years, the human mouth has gotten so small that our teeth no longer fit. And that's the main reason why we're suffering from so many of these chronic respiratory issues. Weightlifters know all about sleep apnea and snoring, because when you get too many muscles around your
56:30 Speaker 00 neck, but your throat is not developed properly to handle that inflow and exhaling of air, you can suffer from sleep apnea, which is one of the reasons why so many weightlifters can suffer from hypertension, is because they suffer from sleep problems.
56:47 Chris Williamson? It's fascinating to think that snoring isn't something that's natural. It's like a, it's like a rite of passage almost. You know, it's such a cultural artifact that everybody, you have someone in a cartoon and they're asleep, the way that they show that they're asleep is the fact that they're snoring.
57:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, this is, this is how bad things have gotten. You know, it's, and once I started getting deeply into this field, so a lot of us know by now, sleep apnea is such bad news.
57:15 Chris Williamson? Have you ever had it? I don't think I've got it. I think I'd know if I did.
57:18 Speaker 00 I only had it when I was in the Stanford experiment and I plugged my nose, I instantly got sleep apnea, which is really scary. It feels, well, you're unconscious, right? So you don't feel it happening. It's just you wake up and you feel like you haven't slept a wink. Your body's all messed, you're starving, you're, you have anxiety, you can't think straight. It's really bad and 20% of the population can tell you how bad it is, because that's, that's roughly the amount who suffers from it. But what people don't get is that snoring, and now the science is really coming out about this, can have so many of the same problems as sleep apnea.
58:02 Speaker 00 What happens when you're inhibiting airflow in and out of your body? You're stressing yourself out all night?
58:12 Speaker 00 You have to struggle to breathe for eight hours out of the night. You're not getting that proper, deep sleep. We know that. And, and all of that rest and restoration that is supposed to happen in sleep takes a huge hit. And I was just talking to Matthew Walker about this and he's like, I totally agree. No one's talking about snoring. They think it's cute when you see an infant snoring. This is someone who's struggling to get energy, right? And it's gonna completely wreck them later on in life.
58:45 Chris Williamson? All right, so what are the top tips for improving breathing during sleep?
58:50 Speaker 00 Breathe through your nose, easier said than done, right? Some people need surgery, okay? Some people can benefit from having these mouth guards. Those work as well. But becoming a nasal breather only has benefits. There are no side effects. Is it gonna cure all your problems? Is it gonna cure every single person snoring, asleep, happening? No. Is it gonna help you across the board at some level? Yes, so why not do it? I use a little piece of sleep tape. I've found that's beneficial. Other people have used other props. Whatever works. Putting the head of your bed up about six inches has been proved, proven to be helpful for some people. Uh, because it helps gravity.
59:33 Speaker 00 When you're putting your head down flat, you're working against gravity.
59:38 Speaker 00 Your tongue is more apt to fall back in the, in the back of your mouth. So putting a couple pillows up and I'm a huge fan of this and it's free. And again, there's no negative side effects. I just got some books and put the head of the bed up by six inches. It's called-
59:54 Chris Williamson? So they went under the mattress?
59:55 Speaker 00 No, no, no. Uh, under, under the bed stand. You don't wanna feel books when you're, when you're sleeping.
1:00:02 Chris Williamson? Okay, true. All right, so yeah, the entire bed is now a little bit of a slant.
1:00:06 Speaker 00 Incline bed therapy, check, check it out. So the whole bed is at a slant. Now they sell sleep number thing. You can spend 10 grand if you want to go that route. You need some books or some bricks or some wood or whatever the hell you have sitting around. So I found that's helpful for people who want to try to figure out they're snoring using their natural body. Sleeping on your back can really exacerbate snoring and sleep apnea. You can tape a little ping pong ball or a sock to the back of a T-shirt so that you don't sleep on your back. They used to do this with people in the military because you get much better sleep when you're not snoring. So I can tell your, your listeners may be into doing this and you can record
1:00:52 Speaker 00 what's working for you with an app. I like an app called SnorLab. No, they aren't paying me to say that. They have a free version of it. Otherwise it's like two bucks, but this records your sleep throughout the night. And you can wear whatever sleep tracker you want and look at the quality of, of your sleep. And I've found that these things can make an incredible difference for some snoring and some sleep apnea. And again, they're basically free and uh, there, there's only benefits associated with them.
1:01:21 Chris Williamson? Do you know how many people are going to go to bed with a ping pong ball strapped to the back? Their misses or their partner or whatever is going to say. Is that a, what have you got there? Don't worry about it. This is, uh, Modern Wisdom was on earlier on. Don't, don't worry about it.
1:01:34 Speaker 00 Do you know how many people go to bed strapping a terrestrial scuba mask to their face?
1:01:38 Chris Williamson? No.
1:01:39 Speaker 00 So they don't suffer from sleep, a CPAP machine?
1:01:41 Chris Williamson? Is that what it is? Is that how they manifest it onto their face?
1:01:45 Speaker 00 Do you know how many tens of millions of people are sleeping with a mask that pumps air in and out of their bodies every night? Because if they didn't have this, their sleep would be a complete disaster and they die of hypertension. So a ping pong ball may seem, here we go with that. What's really weird? Who's the weirdo? Ping pong ball may seem like a very stupid trick, right? It's no stupider than living with sleep apnea or snoring, which is causing a lot of health problems. So, and it's free. Wear a sock. If the sock, get a cute sock and put that on your back if that's, if that's gonna help you. But these, these things, you don't
1:02:30 Speaker 00 have to do these things. You can wear a CPAP and CPAPs work, but here are a few tricks you can try that won't cost you anything.
1:02:36 Chris Williamson? I hadn't ever heard of the vertical bed incline thing before. That's a really, really good idea.
1:02:43 Speaker 00 This is right up your alley. And, and now there's, there's some real science coming out. Check out incline bed therapy. And there's some guy who's been studying it for 20 years. He's, he's pretty wacky, but
1:02:54 Chris Williamson? He sleeps vertically now. He's, he's managed to work his tolerance to the point where he's at 90 degrees.
1:02:59 Speaker 00 He's gotten so good. Yeah. And now he sells straps and duct tape and you can just tape yourself up every night. And there you go. Glad you brought that up. Another new market, everybody. Check Amazon soon.
1:03:10 Chris Williamson? It will be, man. So you talked about freedivers and stuff earlier on. I know that you've got a recreational interest in it as well. What are some of the most extreme feats with regards to breath athletes? What do you call them? Not psychonauts? What are they?
1:03:25 Speaker 00 Pulmonauts.
1:03:26 Chris Williamson? Pulmonauts. That's it. What are the most extreme pulmonaut feats that you've seen?
1:03:30 Speaker 00 That was an umbrella term I made up because I didn't know what to call like, what includes like a researcher, a scientist, a doctor, but also a clinician and also Wim Hof? Like, they all share the saying in common where they're fascinated with the science and mechanics of breathing. And so, but, I mean, Wim's pretty amazing. And what I love about Wim is that he's raised his hand and said, I'll do any scientific experiment at any time. So he's putting his money where his mouth is. And what they're finding is, is things that are just completely redefining our understanding of biology by him volunteering to do this.
1:04:10 Speaker 00 He's pretty impressive. You know, freedivers, any freediver impresses me. And what I love about freediving is you think of the things that you can do on this planet, where you won't be disturbed, where there are no text messages, where there's no emails, where no one can really, where it's totally silent. And that's what the ocean is for me in diving under the ocean. So I've found that freediving, you can do it as a competition. People do that. That's great. That's, that's not my jam. I prefer it as sort of an underwater meditation where you're just using these, these two air tanks called your lungs as your only tool to explore the ocean. And animals respond to this.
1:04:51 Speaker 00 They view you as, as one of their own because they go up, marine mammals go up to the surface, get a breath of air, come back down. They see you doing it. They get so excited. So it's really one of my favorite things to do in, in the whole world is, is just to have that, that silence and that, that moment where you're, you're truly immersed in the ocean, you're immersed in nature, but you're also immediately connected to your own body and its abilities.
1:05:17 Chris Williamson? That's sick. Something that I've never, I've never done before, but I imagine that it must be a very meditative experience. You've taken this breath, you've worked up, you're somewhere, as you say, silent, surrounded by nature, or perhaps surrounded by nothing. Must be really beautiful.
1:05:33 Speaker 00 It is. And I think that freediving gets a bad rap because people associate it with competition. I've written pretty extensively about the competitive side before. I will not go to another competition. It, it just, and, and again, I don't want to, anyone who wants to do that, that's totally fine. You're free to do whatever you want to do, but this other side of freediving, the meditative, the, the yogic side of it, and you really understand and appreciate breathing when you're doing this as, as well. And you, you can't do freediving in an anxious state if you're panicked. Because you know what? You can't hold your breath in those states. So you can only do it when you are centered
1:06:11 Speaker 00 into yourself. And it's something I have not been doing enough of because of the pandemic. And it's the first thing I'm going to go out and do once things really start opening up.
1:06:20 Chris Williamson? It's interesting thinking about the way that sports or a pursuit or a hobby works as a forcing function for the state that you want to get yourself into. So I had Paul Bloom on the show and he was talking about why people have a desire to do extreme sports and it's a forcing function for presence. If you're base jumping in a wingsuit off the side of a mountain and you have a microsecond of lost attention, you're dead. So what it forces people to do, it's, they may enjoy the actual pursuit itself, but what they also like is that the requirements of the pursuit put them into a state that they want to be in. It's like reverse engineering the act to become the, the state, right? And it's the same as what you're talking about here with the freediving.
1:07:04 Chris Williamson? The freediving can be great and everything, but you can't be stressed, you can't be hyperventilating, you can't be thinking about these other things. You have to be in a state that you want to be in. And what you do is you use the practice or the pursuit as a forcing function to get yourself there.
1:07:19 Speaker 00 I think we have been evolved and our biology is as such that we really require these states and we denied them for so long. Whenever we go out and exercise now, we were wearing four different sensors. We've got our phone on, we've got our headset on and that's cool. And I, I do that quite often because it's easier to work out that way. But those, you think about when we were hunting food every single day, right? When we evolved, we were in these states of extreme quiet and focus where you weren't thinking about yesterday, you weren't thinking about tomorrow, you were thinking about that
1:08:00 Speaker 00 exact pinpoint of a moment right there. And I think that our bodies respond to this, they respond to that focus and it allows them to stay balanced afterwards. I know that a lot of people in wingsuits or even freedivers, they have a hard time living in the, in the terrestrial world, in the modern world, without having this release to reset themselves, which is why I find it so interesting that a lot of addicts, some people with some serious drug issues have found freediving and said, this is this release, this focus where I'm able to just be absolutely present on a moment. And instead of having, being distracted by everything else.
1:08:46 Chris Williamson? Naval Ravikant has this quote where he says, "We don't want peace of mind, we want peace from mind." And the breath work, you know, think about when you do a Wim Hof session and you're holding your breath, your mind's not anywhere. You can't think about anything. It forces your thoughts in that way, the same as the wingsuit, the same as the downhill mountain biking, the same as the jujitsu or the mixed martial arts fighting, and the same as other stuff that Paul talks about. I think he's got a new book coming out to do with the pleasures of pain. And he spoke to a dominatrix that said, "Nothing catches the attention like a whip." And she was referring to the fact that if you get slapped in the face for a couple of seconds, you don't think about anything other than the fact that you've
1:09:31 Chris Williamson? been slapped in the face. Peace from mind.
1:09:36 Speaker 00 It's interesting to think that we've developed these different things, including meditation, developed in civilization, right? So, once we moved away from nature, hunter-gatherers don't meditate.
1:09:45 Chris Williamson? Desperately clamoring to get back there.
1:09:48 Speaker 00 We're finding different ways and different tricks to just suit what our bodies have been thirsting for for so long. And no matter how you get that, if you get that through meditation, or free diving, or being in a wingsuit, or even exercising and jogging or surfing, whatever, that's great. But I don't think that we should continue to undervalue those states of, some people call it doing nothing, right? Celebrating doing nothing. I consider that, when you're in the moment, being here now, that's doing everything. That's where you need to be. It's just our modern culture doesn't allow us to lull around in that state for too long, and that's a crime.
1:10:31 Chris Williamson? One year on from when you first released the book, is there something that you've discovered since then that you wish that you could have put in?
1:10:38 Speaker 00 So many things. It's been interesting. The real privilege is to now be in conversations with so many researchers, not only the ones that are in the book, who are all good friends now and will remain good friends, so many other people. I've been able, I did not think that I'd be speaking at Harvard Medical School and Yale Medical School and Stanford, but I have, I've been lucky enough to do that. And they've really sort of pricked up their ears to some of the things I said. And I told them, I said, give me a call afterwards, I'll show you the science. And now I'm, I'm working with some of these people. We're trying to boot up some studies and, you know, so in particular, there are so many things.
1:11:19 Speaker 00 And so for the, the US edition, I'm going to be slipping a few of those, those in. But this is an ongoing story. I did the best I could with the time I had to fit as much as I could within this book, but science doesn't stop, right? It is constantly moving forward. And it's so thrilling to see some real active interest in academic circles into this stuff. There already was for, for decades, but there seems to be more. And I think a lot of that has to do with COVID and looking at the importance of healthy lungs and healthy breathing to help stem off some of the symptoms of, of long-term COVID. And that's exactly what we've been finding.
1:11:59 Chris Williamson? I think you're right as well with saying that often it takes someone who necessarily doesn't come from the field. You know, you've said yourself, you're a journalist rather than some hardcore breath scientist, some pulmonologist or whatever it's called. But popularizing science and being a facilitator and a communicator of it, it doesn't require someone to have the, the deepest knowledge. It requires them to be able to aggregate it and communicate it in a way. So, yeah, I think if, if that's something you've been able to help those guys out with, then quite rightly, they should be coming to you for, for more and more communication like this.
1:12:32 Speaker 00 Well, it's, you know, and I'm not trying to be funny when I say this is I'm totally ignorant of these areas. And I was talking to Joe Rogan about this when I was on a show way back when. And he's like, I'm an idiot. And, and I, I am not embarrassed to ask simple questions. And these are usually the questions that most people want to ask, but, but they're, they're embarrassed to. So I'm not embarrassed to say I know zero about a subject before I go into it. I think it'd be very dishonest to sort of claim otherwise. And a combination of that, of this ignorance in an area, but also curiosity. When I work on a book, it's not an eight hours a day thing.
1:13:14 Speaker 00 It's, it's all day, all night. I dream about it. I write it. I get obsessed with it. And, and I love that. I love falling into that, that world. And honestly, I miss it a little bit. So I'll be doing that again soon, going back in the office and, and digging in again. But it, you know, the long story is there's so much new breathing research coming out from so many top institutions. And it's about time is all, all I can say about that.
1:13:46 Chris Williamson? Beautiful, man. I'm really, really glad that you're the person that's decided to put his life and his nose and his time on the line to make it work. The paperback edition of Breath is now available. Everyone can go and get that from Amazon. If they want to check out more of the things that you do, where should they go?
1:14:03 Speaker 00 So my website has, I know I've mentioned a lot of crazy studies that sound impossible to believe. My publisher allowed me to publish the entire bibliography on my website because I knew a lot of people were going to call BS on this stuff. So you can check it out at Mr. James Nestor. It's dot com. It's all for free there. I've also been doing interviews with leaders in the field at Harvard and other leading institutions who can talk about breathing and the intricacies of breathing. I'm also trying to get better at this Instagram thing. So Mr. James Nestor is my handle. And all these new studies and this new research I'm finding, I'm putting out on Instagram so that people can keep following up on it if they want to get deeper into this stuff.
1:14:44 Chris Williamson? Beautiful. James, thanks so much for today.
1:14:47 Speaker 00 All right. Thanks a lot for having me.
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