Pod Insights TED Radio Hour How to feel alive in an exhausting world About this episode Why do some of us feel so tired, while others seem to have endless energy? This hour, host Manoush Zomorodi explores what science is revealing about stress, breathing, cellular energy and the body.
Guests include mitochondrial psychobiologist Martin Picard and science journalist James Nestor.
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0:42 Manoush Zomorodi? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, the age of exhaustion. What's making us so tired? And how we can get some of our energy back. Have you ever closed your laptop at the end of a long day? And felt like all you could manage next was to crawl over to the couch? To look at your phone? Or watch some TV? Or both? There was a day when this happened to me, and I got so annoyed. Why didn't I want to spring up from my chair at the end of the day? I hadn't moved for hours.
1:27 Manoush Zomorodi? Where did my energy go? Obviously, a lot has happened over the past six years, which is when I first started hosting this show. A pandemic, of course, political turmoil at home and abroad that has put us all on edge. And then there's that AI future that we seem to be careening towards. That's a lot to keep up with. No wonder the average US adult spends over 12 hours a day interacting with media. All that time spent looking at screens, well, we've heard about the effect on our mental health. But what about our physical health? According to researchers at Johns Hopkins,
2:09 Manoush Zomorodi? every day, the average 19-year-old moves about as much as the average 60-year-old. Over the past 20 years, rates of type 2 diabetes in young people have doubled. Three out of four American adults have at least one chronic disease, many of which are preventable. Modern life is clearly doing a number on us. And so today on the show, Antidotes for Our Age of Exhaustion. How our anatomy is responding to a pace of change that feels relentless. New research into how the mind and body communicate on a cellular level and what we can do to feel alive again.
2:50 Manoush Zomorodi? For me, as much as I felt frustrated with all the typing, swiping and sitting I have to do, going off the grid is not an option. And so I wanted to understand why I felt so bad and how I could feel better without having to move to Walden Pond. All this led to NPR's Body Electric Project and a study in 2023 that you may have been part of. And a few months ago, I shared the story from the TED stage. So how can we stay connected without slowly destroying our health? That was the question running through my mind when I came across this guy.
3:31 Manoush Zomorodi? Keith Diaz is a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, and he has spent his entire career trying to figure out how little can we get away with moving so that sitting doesn't kill us, basically. And in 2022, he published a small study that gives us a great idea. He found that just five minutes of gentle movement every 30 minutes had dramatic effects. It slashed blood sugar and blood pressure. In another study, he found that inactive people who traded 30 minutes of sitting for 30 minutes of movement every day could lower their risk of a premature death by 18%. And so maybe you're like, yeah, I worked out this morning, so I'm good.
4:14 Manoush Zomorodi? Or maybe you're like, phew, I'm so glad I got that standing desk. I am so sorry, but no.
4:24 Manoush Zomorodi? If you sit or stand for the majority of your waking hours, your health is in jeopardy too. "Don't stop working out," Keith told me. But he said what you have to do is break up these long stretches of sedentary screen time. I decided I would join the study. So, one day, I went to his lab and I sat and worked on my laptop for eight hours straight. The next day, I took those movement breaks every half hour or so. They checked all my vital signs. And the results were actually quite extraordinary. My glucose was cut nearly in half. My blood pressure was down by five points. And my mood was so much better.
5:08 Manoush Zomorodi? The science was clear. But like, what did it matter if no one could actually do these movement breaks? Like, it was easy in the lab. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and led me over to the treadmill. So we decided to ask people, out in the world, out in real life, to see if they could do it. We, our teams at NPR in Columbia, combined forces to create a podcast and a global clinical trial called the Body Electric Study. And over 20,000 people signed up. We had to cap it at 20,000 people. And they could choose a movement dose. So they could move five minutes every half hour, five minutes every hour, or every two hours. They could dance around the house. They could pace on calls. They could walk the dog. They could take out the trash.
5:53 Manoush Zomorodi? It didn't matter. They just had to break it up. Break up those long periods of sitting. And you guys, I was so excited. I was like, we are gonna launch a movement for movement. Yeah, I've got away with words. Those first few days of the Body Electric Study were tough. If you participated, maybe you remember how much intention and rebellion it takes to move more in a world built around screens and chairs. But people started figuring out how to integrate movement breaks into their lives. And when they did, they started having breakthroughs.
6:33 Speaker 05 My energy went way up. So when you get home from work, you don't feel like cooking dinner. You don't feel like doing anything. I didn't really get any of that while I was doing the study. I feel so much better, have more energy.
6:47 Speaker 00 Can focus better and I'm happier. I felt as if I could go for, for longer and I really felt like the cloud in my brain kind of dissipated.
6:59 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Jordan Smith, Roger Eastman, and Dana Lopez-Miley. People told us they felt less pain, they were less tired, they could focus and felt more positive. Surprisingly, taking breaks did not hurt their productivity. People said they got back to their desks and were able to concentrate better. But why? What was going on in their bodies? Keith explained to me some of the reasons why these gentle breaks can have such an outsized impact. So when we sit, our arteries get bent at our hips and our knees, kind of like a kinked vacuum hose. Blood starts pooling in our legs and our muscles stop contracting.
7:40 Manoush Zomorodi? But leg muscles need to move, be stimulated in order to clear out fat and sugar and reduce blood pressure. If they don't, over months and over years, that's when those chronic conditions can start to creep in. And that is where screens come into the picture. So screens can mess with something called interoception. Interoception is the body's way of telling you what it needs. It needs a snack, it needs to go to the bathroom, it needs to move. The more we focus on screens, the less we listen to the signals that our body is sending us. Your body could be begging for a break, but what do you do? You keep scrolling past the anxiety, scrolling past the exhaustion.
8:24 Manoush Zomorodi? That eventually can lead to burnout, yes, and again, those chronic conditions.
8:31 Manoush Zomorodi? At the end of the clinical trial, we found that of the people who started taking movement breaks, 80% managed to stick with them for two solid weeks. To be sure, this was a self-reported study with lots of very motivated public radio listeners. But still, the data showed that the more often people took breaks, the better they felt. People who went outside got an extra boost, some people lost a few stubborn pounds, and most people actually liked taking the breaks. So how did they do it? That's what I wanted to find out next. While Keith Diaz wrote up the research for scientific publication, which is now under peer review, I spent the last few years combing through the surveys and stories and data
9:15 Manoush Zomorodi? that all the participants shared. I wanted to understand why some people dropped out almost immediately, but others stuck with movement breaks and thrived. And one of the many things I found was that different life stages required different tactics. Retired people, for example, they often moved more during the day, but they needed to take breaks around the house to disrupt long evenings usually spent sitting at screens. Information workers, those who sat at a desk all day long, were typically interrupted by annoying messages and pings from their colleagues. But when they scheduled purposeful interruptions and added five minutes of movement, they reported that the quality of their work improved
9:59 Manoush Zomorodi? and they liked their jobs more.
10:03 Manoush Zomorodi? So how can you start making a change and feeling better? Well, first, think about your most sedentary stretches of time. And then make yourself a mantra. So like, if you are a student, you could say, I'll take an extra lap around the quad before class instead of checking TikTok, so I get to class with more oxygen in my brain and I can actually focus. Or if you work from home, you could decide that on long Zoom calls, I will march in place in order to manage my glucose and avoid the post-meeting crash. If you're a parent, you could say, I will take a lap around the soccer field once so that I have enough energy to get through the dinnertime chaos. You can have a dance party while you microwave your leftovers.
10:47 Manoush Zomorodi? You can walk the concourse instead of sitting and waiting for your flight. A mix of all these habits will keep your muscles firing and your mood steadier. My favorite story came from a 43-year-old woman named Dana who works in HR. So Dana was a type 2 diabetic with all kinds of health issues. Her doctor told her she needed to take a long brisk walk every morning, and she was due- Doing this, but her numbers just were not changing. So with her doctor's permission, she decided to join the study. She started fitting in movement breaks between all of her meetings. And within a couple of weeks, she told me her blood pressure dropped by 40 points. Her cholesterol went down, and her doctor told her she could start tapering her insulin.
11:31 Manoush Zomorodi? She's actually off all of her meds today. I know. Yay, Dana. We love you, Dana.
11:39 Manoush Zomorodi? So we know that too much time online is not great for our mental health. But it's not just in our heads. It's in our bodies. We need movement to be as much a part of our lives as screens are. We need our schools, our neighborhoods, our workplaces to give us time and space just to move. You can help push this reset forward. Take movement breaks. And when people look at you like you're weird, just tell them why you're doing it. Because you just want to feel a little better. Get them to put down their phone and join you. Start soon. Start small. Should we start now? Yeah. Let's, can we have some music?
12:22 Manoush Zomorodi? You could do, you could do the march. You could do the shuffle. Little hands in the air if you can't get up. Feel it. You're alive. You're alive. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, the host of NPR's TED Radio Hour and the author of Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being. You can see my TED Talk at ted.com. And if you participated in the Body Electric study, thank you so, so much. When we come back, new research into metabolism and how your body gives you energy on a cellular level.
13:06 Manoush Zomorodi? On the show today, Antidotes for Our Age of Exhaustion. You're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
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15:00 Manoush Zomorodi? This message comes from REI Co-op. At REI, they don't just sell outdoor gifts. They use them, test them, trust them. REI knows what to give this season, from joy rides, campfire cheers, or peak views. REI knows what to give the people you love who love to get out there because they're out there, too. Just stop in and ask a green vest. For the best gifts out there, shop in-store or at REI.com. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, the age of exhaustion. What's making us so tired? And how can we get our energy back?
15:43 Manoush Zomorodi? There are some people who just seem to be up for anything. They are always on the go.
15:48 Speaker 02 There are certainly people who look and feel and behave as if they have more energy than others. That's a fact.
15:58 Manoush Zomorodi? This is Martin Picard. He's a medical scientist who studies human energy on a cellular level. And Martin thinks the answer to why certain people have more energy might be found in...
16:11 Speaker 02 Those beautiful little things that are in our cells, the mitochondria.
16:15 Manoush Zomorodi? Yes. Researchers are taking a new look at mitochondria, the tiny organelles that swim around in some of our cells.
16:24 Speaker 02 What we've discovered in the last few years is that different people have very different kinds of mitochondria. And some people's mitochondria seem to be quite a bit better at flowing energy.
16:35 Manoush Zomorodi? If you haven't thought about mitochondria since middle school, here's a quick refresher and some new knowledge about how they work in the body.
16:44 Speaker 02 Every living creature is made of cells. But if it wasn't for the energy flowing through the mitochondria, then we wouldn't be alive. So the difference between a thinking, breathing, conscious person, like you and I that are having this discussion now, and a cadaver, the main difference is the flow of energy. And what mitochondria do is they take energy in one form, which is food, and then they transform it first into a little electrical charge. So they literally create this little electrical charge, and then they use that electrical charge for all sorts of things, dozens of things that mitochondria do.
17:22 Manoush Zomorodi? I remember learning mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. Are we right?
17:27 Speaker 02 Yes. The powerhouse analogy was very useful in the 60s, when 50s, 1950s, 1960s.
17:36 Manoush Zomorodi? 80s. And more recently, my kids were told it was the powerhouse analogy.
17:41 Speaker 02 I know. I was told that too in school, and I still hear this from you students that come in the lab. That analogy is too simple. A powerhouse is a little machine. It does one thing mitochondria are living beings and they do dozens of things. So mitochondria produce hormones like cortisol and the sex hormones that allow pregnancy and and like testosterone and that allows the male characteristics. They regulate ions inside the cell like calcium. They are responsible for regulating oxidative stress inside our cells, turning on genes, turning off genes, regulating the epigenome.
18:23 Speaker 02 So mitochondria do a number of things that are critical to cell life. As a medical scientist, my team and I work hard to understand the basis of human health.
18:34 Manoush Zomorodi? Martin Picard explains more in his TED Talk.
18:37 Speaker 02 As Peter Sterling says in his book, What is Health? Health is the ability to optimally respond and adapt to challenges. Why do some people remain healthy for decades while others get sick often and die early? For the past two or three decades, scientists have approached this question by focusing on genes. Static stretches of DNA packaged in the cell nucleus. But you see, our genes are like the inert stuff inside our phone. The screen, the computer chip, the charging port. And health is more like the interactive nature of your phone. Like how it vibrates when you press something or how the screen turns on when a call or text comes in.
19:21 Speaker 02 Without charge and energy, there's nothing on the screen, blank. The hardware doesn't allow you to experience or to connect with anything unless it's energized, just like your genome. And in terms of longevity, the best research from over 50 million people shows that genes predict less than 7% of how long we live. Less than 7%. So when it comes to health and longevity, science shows that genes are mostly not in control.
19:56 Speaker 02 I think medicine has failed to understand health so far because we've essentially focused on the hardware without understanding the role of energy.
20:05 Speaker 02 In our health.
20:06 Manoush Zomorodi? Okay, so we know now that genes are not as responsible for as much of our health as we we used to think. But you've been studying how genetic defects of mitochondria can teach us more about how important they are to our overall biological system.
20:22 Speaker 02 Yes, so you know, for for many years now, I've been going to the the clinic where I see patients with rare mitochondrial diseases that impairs the ability of their mitochondria to flow energy from food to oxygen. And, you know, more than ninety percent of them, the thing that bothers them the most is fatigue. They feel like they have no energy. So it, we know it feels like something when your mitochondria cannot flow energy properly. So then the the next question is, well, is this then the driving force behind, you know, other people who feel fatigue and tired, like, you know, people who have chronic fatigue syndrome or, you know, long COVID
21:04 Speaker 02 or any other normal human being who goes through a phase in their life where they, you know, they're completely depleted and exhausted. Is this because the mitochondria are are impaired? And we don't know the answer to that question, but it's quite possible.
21:18 Manoush Zomorodi? But but let's say I have like a cold and I'm tired and I don't feel like eating. What is making me tired with that? What's the thinking and how does that relate to mitochondria?
21:28 Speaker 02 Yes, what's going on there? That's a great question. What happens then is not that your mitochondria are are broken or dysfunctional or that something is wrong with the the the energetic circuitry of your body. What's happening here is what we called energy trade offs or energy constraint. And when one part of the body is burning more energy than it should, it steals energy away from other parts of the body. So the body makes really rapid decisions about where is energy most essential? So if there's an infection to survive another day, another week, you need to allocate energy towards the immune system.
22:11 Speaker 02 So as a result, because the immune system is burning all this energy, it kind of steals energy away from from the mind and from cognition and from everything else in the body. So that feels terrible and and rightfully so, because then if you feel terrible, you just want to lie down in bed, conserve energy so that there's as much energy available for the for the immune system. And it seems like what we feel is not the total amount of energy we have on the body, but it's how well energy is flowing.
22:42 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, so I mean, I think we hear the mind-body connection, and that sounds kind of woo-woo or something. But your research suggests that actually the mitochondria might be the sort of missing link, that the way that the mind and the body are conversing?
22:58 Speaker 02 Exactly. The mind and the body are not two things that are kind of conversing. There are two expressions of a deeper underlying process. And that deeper underlying process is energy transformation and the flow of energy, really. Fundamentally, the question that I think we need to solve in medicine and biomedical research is how is it that the biology of energy and other aspects of biology, how is that related to the human experience?
23:34 Speaker 02 How mind and body communicate to shape our long-term health remains one of the biggest mysteries in medicine. And that's not a problem of genes, but one of energy and communication. So what about mitochondria? Do they communicate? Well, if you look at their behavior inside the cell, you see that they function as a dynamic network.
24:01 Speaker 02 And just like your phone connects wirelessly to other mobile phones, mitochondria produce wireless signals that influence each other. Mitochondria can also often migrate around the cell nucleus. And as they surround you with 25,000 genes, mitochondria dictate important information to turn on or turn off specific genes.
24:23 Speaker 02 They can even jump between cells to rescue other cells in trouble. Mitochondria have evolved into a social network. They're collaborative and communicative. And we know that this kind of biological communication is vital, because losing that alone causes disease.
24:42 Speaker 02 For example, depression is caused by impaired communication between neurons. Alzheimer's disease involves impaired communication between different parts of the brain. And the ultimate loss of communication between cells causes cancer. Cancer cells are cells that have lost touch with their mitochondria and therefore start to rely on other energy sources. They effectively revert back to their ancestral bacterial nature before endosymbiosis, to their selfish unicellular state where growth is all that mattered. Because of that, cancer cells become disconnected from the rest of the network, just like
25:24 Speaker 02 a dead phone unable to connect to anything. Without normal mitochondria and communication, cancer cells end up breaking the social contract with other cells, which threatens the whole organism. So it's becoming clear that to understand the basis of health, we cannot just study human biology or psychology because the body and the mind are powered by the same thing and communicate via their mitochondria. Naturally, this led to a new interdisciplinary field of research called mitochondrial psychobiology. The goal of mitochondrial psychobiology is to map new pathways of communication between
26:08 Speaker 02 the mind and the body, or the mind-mitochondria connection, to better understand human health.
26:14 Manoush Zomorodi? So all the mitochondria, when they're healthy, they are all talking to each other. Is that because they all work the same way? Or are there different kinds of mitochondria? Like, do different parts of the body have different types of mitochondria?
26:27 Speaker 02 Yes. Different types of mitochondria in different types of cells and different organs. So the mitochondria of the liver are very different than the mitochondria of the kidney, which are different than the mitochondria of the brain and the heart and the muscles, the pancreas, and so on. You can think of the human body as kind of a social collective, and there are different organs, different cells that play different roles.
26:51 Speaker 02 receives, integrates data and input from all senses. And it coordinates every cell and organ. Just like your phone needs energy in its battery to receive, process and send data. The brain needs energy to do this, a lot of energy. So the cells in your brain are packed with lots of mitochondria. In fact, the brain is only 2% of your body weight. But its mitochondria consume up to 20% of the oxygen and energy of the whole body. It's like a phone with 100 apps running in the background, constantly needing to be charged. Every second, we breathe to bring oxygen into our lungs and blood.
27:35 Speaker 02 And our heart circulates the blood to carry oxygen to every cell and organ, including your brain. Just how important feeding oxygen to mitochondria is, becomes obvious when things go wrong. Like when a stroke or a heart attack cuts off oxygen to the brain. Without the constant delivery of oxygen to mitochondria, everything stops. Your inner screen goes blank and your consciousness ends. Energy doesn't just power all biochemical reactions in the body. It gives us the ability to think, to feel, to worry and to create. Energy powers our mind.
28:14 Manoush Zomorodi? Do you mind, like, I wonder if you just take me into a brain cell? Put me in there with the mitochondria and explain what exactly it's doing.
28:25 Speaker 02 So let's imagine we shrink and we enter the brain. And then there's this amazing density of neurons, different kinds of neurons. And then we see this one neuron. And what you would see as you enter the cell is these spaghetti, you know, bean looking like units, the mitochondria. That are kind of gently and slowly moving around in the cytoplasm, kissing each other, fusing with each other, dividing. And those mitochondria are there, receiving inputs, integrating information and then sending outputs to the cell nucleus. That's kind of sits there in the middle. Of the neuron. So because of this little collective of mitochondria in the cytoplasm, which is what we call the inside of the cell,
29:10 Speaker 02 the neuron can come to life. And it can express the right genes and it can receive information and produce action potential, right? The neurons fire. That costs a lot of energy and it comes mostly from the mitochondria transforming energy.
29:25 Manoush Zomorodi? So if you see like a scan of a brain and they show you where there's activity, that means that the mitochondria are sending out the signals, electricity is being generated and processing is happening.
29:38 Speaker 02 Yes. What you see is typically the oxygen levels that are changing in the brain. And the oxygen levels that you see on a scan really reflect the mitochondria consuming, breathing the oxygen of the brain, right? And then transforming energy.
29:57 Manoush Zomorodi? So mitochondria are really, they're driving our metabolism. Is that fair to say?
30:02 Speaker 02 Exactly.
30:04 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, so let's talk about how we can, I mean, is that a good health goal to increase your mitochondrial health?
30:13 Speaker 02 There's science certainly that says if you have lots of mitochondria, you can flow energy easily. This is associated with better health, physical health, mental health and with longevity. One way to do that, to make lots of well-functioning mitochondria, is moving, exercising. Because when you exercise, what happens is you cause energy resistance in the body. If you contract your muscles because you're running or lifting or swimming or biking, you're causing energy resistance in the body. And it feels uncomfortable because you're pushing and blood lactate increase. Then the body will say, next time this happens, I need to be ready. So I'm going to make more mitochondria. So that's called mitochondrial biogenesis.
30:58 Speaker 02 So exercise is something that enhances overall health because it improves the number of mitochondria in your body. And then if you have more mitochondria, you can flow energy more easily.
31:09 Manoush Zomorodi? Fascinating. So if I am like, I want to feel energized, I want to feel positive. What are some of the things you recommend doing so that we can keep our mitochondria functioning and talking to each other and getting energy into the rest of our cells?
31:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, great question. The first thing is moving, exercise, right? Anything you do that makes you breathe harder, including running, rowing, swimming, biking, making love, whatever it is that makes you breathe harder, that's, you breathe harder because your mitochondria are using more oxygen. And then if, if you're driving mitochondrial energy flow, then the body is going to make more mitochondria to, to be ready the next time this happens. So moving and exercise, number one. Number two, not eating too much. When we eat too much, it seems to give mitochondria excess energy and then that, that drives
32:07 Speaker 02 energy resistance. And that's, that's not good. If you feel hungry once in a while, what this does is it stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis. You get rid of the old mitochondria that are less efficient and you make more of the new mitochondria that are more efficient. And that's probably why fasting, intermittent fasting, or 24, 48, 72 hour fasting are, are very healthy in many contexts and why every ancient tradition in the world has a fast, you know, as part of their, their tradition or their practice. Unfortunately, the science that, that we've cultivated in the, in the Western world,
32:49 Speaker 02 biomedicine is all about, you know, the, the stuff, the biology outside of us. And the mind is kind of this one thing that we, we've thrown out the window and that we've left for, for others to, to study. I think we need to bridge this. Most of the actionable knowledge, right? The new things that are there to be discovered that will make a meaningful impact on, on our health, right? That the discoveries that have the ability to touch human lives lies at the intersection of disciplines and at the intersection of the, the biological sciences and the science of, of the, of the mind.
33:27 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Martin Picard. He's a mitochondrial psychobiologist and a professor at Columbia University. You can watch his full talk at ted.npr.org. On the show today, the age of exhaustion and how we can feel better. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
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36:22 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, the age of exhaustion, and how we can get our energy back. We have talked about how movement and cellular function are crucial to feeling good in our mind and body. And now, a look at another basic function that gives us energy: breath. Without enough oxygen, of course, you're gonna get tired pretty quickly. But should we be breathing better?
36:54 Speaker 02 I don't think that most people realize just how important how we breathe is.
36:58 Manoush Zomorodi? Breath and breath work are hot topics on so-called bro wellness podcasts. I dropped a video on polyphasic sleeping. How would you guys like to learn a 60-second breath work technique? I just finished up like a seven-minute guided breathing session. Oh, my god, bro. Why am I shaking? Whose idea was this? Yeah, well, writer James Nestor has no time for this.
37:21 Speaker 02 Most of those bros who claim to be at absolute peak health are the worst breathers you can find out there.
37:29 Manoush Zomorodi? Really?
37:30 Speaker 02 I'm being serious, because a lot of them are completely vain, and they do not allow
37:37 Speaker 04 Their stomachs to relax.
37:39 Speaker 02 Oh.
37:40 Speaker 04 If you are constantly inhaling and sucking up your gut, you're inhibiting the extension of the diaphragm. You're inhibiting blood flow. You're inhibiting the ability of the body to pump lymph fluid. You are causing stress because you are clenching your stomach and sending signals up to your brain that you are in a state of stress. So don't look to those bros for healthy breathing.
38:07 Manoush Zomorodi? James is a science journalist, but he embarked on trying to better understand what happens when we breathe properly because of personal problems.
38:17 Speaker 04 I was suffering from chronic bronchitis. I was getting mild bouts of pneumonia every year. I was starting to wheeze when I was working out and I thought I was doing everything right. You know, eating the right foods, exercising, sleeping eight hours a night, all of that. But I just kept getting sick with breathing problems. So it wasn't until a doctor friend suggested I look into my breathing habits, which is something I had never thought about before. And once I adjusted those habits and started understanding that it's not just that we're breathing, but how we're breathing. It had a huge transformational effect,
39:01 Speaker 04 not only on my respiration, but on other aspects of my health.
39:05 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, can you explain like what is poor breathing? And what is good breathing?
39:12 Speaker 04 Poor breathing is what you see when you look at around 90% of the population. It includes breathing through the mouth. It includes breathing up into the chest. It includes unconsciously holding your breath, breathing too much, snoring, sleep apnea, asthma, on and on and on.
39:30 Manoush Zomorodi? And what are the consequences of that? How does that impact a person's health? Because I think people think, well, if as long as I'm like breathing, I'm alive, right?
39:39 Speaker 04 Well, on the milder spectrum, the consequences are more asthma, more panic, more anxiety, more stress. On the more severe. Your spectrum, if you continue having very dysfunctional breathing habits throughout your life, especially at night, that can lead to increased risk of stroke, heart disease, periodontal disease, diabetes. So all of these major chronic diseases that we're contending with have some sort of connection to how we're breathing.
40:10 Manoush Zomorodi? You call breathing like this a lost art. When did we lose it?
40:17 Speaker 04 It's hard to trace the exact moment, but you can trace a lot of this to the age of industrialization. We lost so much 400 years ago, 300 years ago. So we lost our food supply that used to be whole foods and natural and require a bunch of chewing, which allowed us to expand our mouths and tone our airways and breathe better. But we've also lost our ability to have proper posture. And without having proper posture, it is very difficult to take a proper breath. If you are hunched over, you can't extend your belly. You can't take that
40:56 Speaker 04 soft, slow, deep breath. All your breath gets caught up in your chest, and that is extremely inefficient.
41:04 Manoush Zomorodi? You're right. There's no room. I just caught myself like I'm leaned over my laptop and um, there's nowhere for it to go. The air just has to go up. Whatever happened to stomachs in, shoulders back? That's what I used to be told.
41:17 Speaker 04 The old days, yeah. So if you are ever apprehensive about how you're breathing, look at how a healthy dog breathes, healthy infant breathes, a cheetah, a horse, a cow. They breathe very deep. Their stomachs expand very gently when they breathe. They breathe very slowly and they breathe in and out of their noses. So the problem with chest breathing is that the majority of the area of the lungs that absorbs oxygen are those lower lobes. So if you're just breathing into your chest, you're taking air in that you never use. About 50% of that air you won't be using. And so that causes you to breathe more. And the more you breathe,
42:02 Speaker 04 you start sending stress signals to the brain. And if you have dysfunctional breathing habits in the day, absolutely, it's going to affect your ability to focus, to get oxygen efficiently, to regulate your emotions. And more.
42:17 Manoush Zomorodi? In your book, you write about your participation in a study where you plugged your nose for 10 days straight, breathing only from your mouth to see what sort of effect it had on your health. Can, can you share that story, what it was like for you and what you ended up discovering?
42:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, I had been talking with the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. And I said, why don't you get a group of 100 people and have them just mouth breathe? And we can take a bunch of data and then have the other 100 just nasal breathe. And he said, this is a great idea. I will never do it because of ethical reasons. Yeah, he, he said, I know the damage that will be done after just a week of mouth breathing. And so I finally convinced him. I said, well, what if we did it with two people, me and one other person? And for 10 days, we were just mouth breathing. For the other 10 days, we were just nasal breathing.
43:19 Speaker 04 And a lot of my friends gave me a lot of grief because they said, oh, this is like some supersize me stunt, whatever. But we didn't view it this way. I mean, we really didn't because you've got up to 50% of the population is mouth breathing. They don't realize the damage that's happening to their bodies. So we tried to measure that over 10 days. That was the maximum he would allow. And as advertised, it was an absolute disaster for our health, so much more so than we even thought.
43:48 Manoush Zomorodi? What did you find?
43:49 Speaker 04 So I do not snore. I do not have sleep apnea. Within a single day of becoming a mouth breather, I was snoring about an hour and a half throughout the night. Within three days, about four to five hours a night, just constant. I felt awful the next morning, every single time. The other subject in the study had the same thing. It was very hard for us to focus. Our athletic performance went down. We were extremely agitated. Stress levels went through the roof. Blood pressure went through the roof. And when I shared this data with people in the field, they were not surprised at all. They said, Of course, this is what's gonna happen, right? We've known this for decades and decades.
44:33 Speaker 04 You just experienced it personally.
44:37 Manoush Zomorodi? So that's why mouth breathing is bad. But what's so good about breathing through your nose? What are the benefits?
44:47 Speaker 04 Let me just tell you a little, another mouth breathing study that I thought was interesting. A study in Japan got a bunch of rats and they plugged the noses of one group of rats and they left the other rats as they were, as nasal breathers. And they looked at them throughout several weeks and also tested them to see how efficiently they could navigate a maze. Those mouth breathing rats took significantly longer to get through the maze as the nasal breathing rats. And then they looked at their brains and they found that their brain structure had literally changed after around 15 to 16 weeks of mouth breathing.
45:30 Speaker 04 They had significantly fewer neurons in areas of the brain that are associated with memory, learning ability, brain development more. So we know it's bad and I don't think you're gonna find anyone who's studied this who would say otherwise. However, the other side of this nasal breathing is so beneficial for us because it slows down the breath, which calms us down. It allows us to get about 18% more oxygen per breath than equivalent breaths through the mouth. It filters the gunk and bacteria and helps sterilize viruses. It allows for better circulation. I mean, I can go on and on and on.
46:13 Speaker 04 So we also know that and there's no controversy around this. These aren't hypotheses. This is documented scientific facts.
46:22 Manoush Zomorodi? I have to say, that chapter in your book, every night I get into bed and I like consciously, I'm like, okay, relax your mouth, close it. I even like, this is a little TMI, but I stick my fingers up my nostrils to try to expand them because I don't want to wear one of those bandages, but it does help me. And I find that once I get into that position at night, I am able to, most mornings I do wake up with nose breathing.
46:49 Speaker 04 That's a great habit to have and various people use various different training wheels to get there. You can use those little strips that go on the nose that open up the nostrils, allow for about thirty percent more air. You can use different flushes and sprays that help open up the nose as well. So everyone's different, so everyone needs a different kind of thing. But I am more convinced now than ever that I don't think you can be a healthy breather. And you can have quality sleep if you are not nasal breathing. It is so important for so many reasons, and this is something I've heard from literally thousands of people have sent me.
47:28 Speaker 04 For some unknown reason, their sleep data showing the difference of sleep quality, deep sleep, HRV on and on and on of just switching to nasal breathing.
47:41 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm thinking someone might be listening and and wondering, do I do this? I don't even know if I do this. What is a way that we can really see how well we're breathing during the day while we are trying to do our work?
47:56 Speaker 04 It's hard, you know, you can go into a lab and be assessed that way. A few people are going to do that. HRV is one thing that can provide a good general outlook of your stress levels.
48:09 Manoush Zomorodi? HRV, heart rate variability, right?
48:11 Speaker 04 Heart rate variability. This is the latest craze in wearable. Everybody's measuring it nowadays. So right now, if you were to place your hand over your heart, if you're really focusing, as you inhale,
48:28 Speaker 04 your heart rate speeds up and as you exhale,
48:33 Speaker 04 it slows down. So the more space you have between those heartbeats and the inhale and exhale are indicative of your stress levels. You want more of a difference, more of a variability between those two things.
48:48 Manoush Zomorodi? That's funny also because I I always thought a nice steady heartbeat is what you want, but actually you don't.
48:54 Speaker 04 That is a harbinger of disease and future death.
49:00 Speaker 04 That's what I've been told by cardiologists. Once they start hearing a heartbeat that sounds like a clock, they get really scared.
49:09 Manoush Zomorodi? I worry about, well, I worry about adding more worries to people's plates. There's a lot to worry about these days and I don't want people to be like, oh my God, please tell me, don't tell me one word thing that I need to measure or need technology for, or I need to think about. What is, I don't know, a more holistic, somatic, internal way of checking in with yourself during the day?
49:39 Speaker 04 So, nobody needs more boxes to check, right? I think that breathing doesn't have to become a burden. Maybe for a couple of weeks, as you develop better habits, that might require you to spend a little more time and energy, but once you develop those habits, you don't have to think about it because no one wants to have to think about the 20,000 breaths they're taking every single day. You want to have good habits, so your body automatically does that.
50:10 Manoush Zomorodi? Can you take us through a sort of reset, an exercise that we could do to just sort of bring ourselves back to that healthy breathing?
50:23 Speaker 04 The first thing I would ask people to do is taking your hand, placing it around where your belly button is, just lightly over your stomach. And as you inhale, you want to feel that slight expansion, that abdominal region.
50:41 Speaker 04 And then as you continue inhaling, try to lift that breath up to your chest area. So you start low and you work it up a little higher.
50:51 Speaker 04 And then if you slow that down, breathing in and out of your nose at a rate of around five to six seconds in,
51:05 Speaker 04 five to six seconds out.
51:12 Speaker 04 You'll start to notice your shoulders relaxing.
51:19 Speaker 04 You'll start to notice the muscles in your face relaxing.
51:27 Speaker 04 You'll feel your heart rate lower. If you are looking at your blood pressure, most people see a significant drop in blood pressure because this is your body re-entering its natural state, the state in which it was designed to be in that we are so divorced from today.
51:47 Manoush Zomorodi? So this is taking some concentration on my part and it's lovely.
51:52 Speaker 04 It's gonna take some concentration at the beginning, especially with people who have never taken a focus, deep, easy, soft breath. But then tomorrow, when you do it, you're gonna say, hmm, this is a little bit easier. And then the next day, it gets easier. And a few weeks from now, you're gonna be doing this unconsciously. I cannot tell you what a difference this is gonna make for your stress levels at work, for your ability to focus. There's been studies that have found that people make significantly better decisions when they are breathing slowly, when they are breathing calmly. It helps you regulate your emotions better. Breathe this way for two minutes a day.
52:35 Speaker 04 And I think even that's gonna make a difference.
52:40 Manoush Zomorodi? What I love about our conversation is that it feels like it's something that you could work on. And then maybe your body would take over in some ways. That feels like a relief to me.
52:56 Speaker 04 That's exactly the point of so many of these practices. Once you establish it, you don't have to think about it. And once you don't have to think about it, you start to notice that you're feeling different. And this is backed up by any wearable that you have.
53:13 Manoush Zomorodi? And have on your body. And then you feel so much better that you want to go further into this. You want to explore what else breathing can do. That's James Nestor. His book is called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
53:31 Manoush Zomorodi? Thank you so much for listening to our episode. It was produced by Katie Monteleone and James Delahoussaye and edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Phoebe Lett, Fiona Giran, Matthew Cloutier, Harsha Nahada, and Rachel Faulkner White. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Helen Walters, Roxane Hylash, and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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