How a Simple Change Can Improve Your Health, Sleep and More with James Nestor
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Today, I want to share the most underrated hack for your health. It's easy, it's totally free, and it helps with everything from immunity to sleep to sickness, asthma, anxiety, and more. And you might think I'm talking about exercise or a healthy diet, but I am not. I'm talking about something the majority of us have been doing wrong for most of our lives, breathing. And we're going to walk through exactly what you can do to fix it and transform your health. Why should people care about solving this problem?

I'm Chris Hutchins, and this is All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. Today, we're talking with James Nestor, the bestselling author of Breath,

and world-renowned expert on this topic. Do you think the average person even knows if they're a mouth or a nose breather? No, I don't think they do. And a lot of people will deny it. And you are going to be blown away at how early this problem can actually start. If you go into your kid's room at night, if you see them breathing with an open mouth, if they are holding their breath, if they are snoring, these are serious warning signs. And if you don't do anything about it, we know that this directly leads to developmental problems in the brain and in the body.

But there is good news. You can change your airway. You can change your mouth size. If we've made ourselves sick, we can make ourselves healthy again. How quickly would someone start to see some impact of doing this? 30 seconds. You think I'm joking? Okay, let's go fix our breathing with James Nestor right after this.

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James, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. So humans, why do you think we are the worst breathers in the animal kingdom? What are we doing wrong? I won't tell you why I think we are the worst breathers. I will tell you why we are the worst breathers.

So there's a number of different things. I'll start with the most obvious, and to me it was the most revelatory thing. The fact that our faces have changed, our mouths have changed, our airways have changed, our sinus cavities have changed in the past around 300 to 400 years.

And this has been caused by industrialized food. We don't chew and everything's shrunk, which is why we have crooked teeth. And with crooked teeth, you have a smaller mouth, smaller mouth, smaller airway breathing problems. So that's the first of a multifaceted series of reasons why we are such terrible breathers.

What's the impact of all this, right? We could talk about how we could get better and what we're doing wrong, but why should people care about solving this problem? If you're breathing improperly, you are denying yourself oxygen. So it makes it harder for your body to process oxygen. You are making your heart work harder, which leads to hypertension, other issues. You are making it harder for your brain to focus and to make decisions.

You are increasing your chances of having respiratory disorders. You are increasing your chances of having anxiety and panic. I can keep going. Why don't we keep going? So it's a disaster for your health. Just like as if you were to eat bad food, it's very bad for your health, right? That's very obvious. If you sleep poorly, it's bad for your health, right?

But people don't realize that if you breathe poorly, if you are constantly suffering from even a slight dysfunction in your breathing, it's going to impact you. And it impacts you in so many different ways. You talked about how we've evolved from food. Obviously, we can't go as individuals back in time and change evolution. But how much of the way we breathe and the issues we might have from it are things we can actually change and correct?

The vast majority. You can change your airway. You can change your mouth size. You can change the bone density in your face. So you can change all of these things. If we've made ourselves sick, we can make ourselves healthy again. I've read the book. I've listened to a few talks you've given. It sounds like a big culprit is...

The passage we're breathing through, whether it's our mouth or our nose, is that the place to start? It is. It's the most boring place to start. And nobody wants to do this. Everyone wants to go to breathwear classes and, you know, put on white clothes and put on some necklaces and do that thing. And that's great. But you have to start with the simple stuff. You have to start with the foundation and then build up from there. And the foundation, the number one thing is to become a nasal breather. And if you don't do that, I don't think you can ever be healthy.

Across all forms of health. Yeah, I am more sure of this now than I ever was. I don't know if I would have said that like seven years ago, but the more people I talk to, the more research I do, the more I'm convinced that if you are not an obligate nasal breather, you can never be healthy. How many people, if you had to ballpark in the population, are not

nasal breathers? It depends. So at night, around 60% of us breathe through the mouth. So in the daytime, kids are the worst culprits. They're the worst breathers. So up to 50%, sometimes a little higher than that, sometimes a little lower depending on the survey or the study, but it's about half of the population. And so you have to start with that. And

How do you even diagnose yourself, right? I've been thinking about this interview and trying to be self-aware, but...

Do you think the average person even knows if they're a mouth or a nose breather? No, I don't think they do. And a lot of people will deny it, even if they are. So you have to, first of all, be interested enough to want to do something to diagnose yourself. Then you have to be interested enough to treat yourself. How many people are interested in that? I don't know. And that's not my job is to try to convince someone to do something. I'm here to give you

the facts of what I've learned along this journey of researching all of this stuff. So one thing you can do in the daytime is set an alarm, maybe four alarms per day. When that alarm goes off,

Take notice of how you're breathing in that moment. Are you breathing into the chest? Are you breathing through your mouth? Another thing you can do at night is this little controversial is to try using a little piece of tape. And if that's very uncomfortable, then there's a very good chance you're a mouth breather at night. If you wake up with a dry mouth all the time, if you're peeing throughout the night, if you snore or if you have sleep apnea, it's a very high chance you have a

mouth breathing. I did an episode once with someone who suggested trying to use mouth tape. And for anyone listening, I would say it sounds a lot more daunting than it is as an experiment. There are many ways to do this. You don't have to buy a particular brand. You can use any surgical tape, micropore tape. Don't use duct tape or scotch tape or anything like that. You want to find a tape that's designed to be put on skin. And

And you want to take some of the adhesive off. So this is a reminder, just a little piece of tape, a reminder to keep your mouth shut. That's all it is. And at any time, it comes right off. That's why I don't think it's dangerous. Even though you still hear ENTs and dentists and doctors saying, you know, putting your life in your own hands by wearing this teeny piece of tape over your mouth at night. I think you're putting your life in your own hands if you're suffering from mouth breathing and snoring all night and suffering from sleep apnea.

They're not talking about that part. I was surprised. My wife and I tried it. If I remember correctly, because this was a couple years ago, she found it more uncomfortable than I did. Maybe I'm more naturally a nasal breather than she was, but it was a good experiment. Well, it sucks for the first couple of weeks, and that's why most people give up.

Right. They try it a couple of nights and it's terrible. And then they move on to something else. But just like most things, once you acclimate to it, you get used to it. It gets much easier. So I have a hard time sleeping without it now. So I'm the guy in a downtown hotel who forgot to pack it, who's walking the streets at night, you know, looking for Walgreens.

looking for some sleep tape because it makes such a difference to my sleep and I track my sleep so I can see it. Even though you've learned to be a nasal breather, you can't just train yourself to breathe through your nose without it.

Some people can. I'm not one of those lucky people. I don't want to use this stuff to be clear. Okay, this is not something I want to have to pack in all my different suitcases and carry-ons. But it's something that I need and I have tried to sleep without it. And whenever I do, I just have the facial structure that when I put my head back, my mouth is open.

So I think I'm sort of screwed and I'm stuck with this stuff the rest of my life. But it makes such a huge difference to my sleep quality and so many other facets of my health that I'm going to continue doing it. You know, that's one place to start. But I think you said your oral posture might be another place to start thinking about this. I imagine the average person listening has no idea what oral posture even is.

So this is this concept where there is a proper way in which you should be holding your tongue in your mouth and a proper way in which your teeth should be a certain amount of distance between your back molars and your lips should always be shut. I didn't know anything about this. I thought this was fine posture for your mouth.

But it turns out that when you hold your tongue to the roof of your mouth, this helps expand the palate, especially when you're younger, helps expand the face, helps expand the airway. So that's all good stuff. It helps expand the sinuses as well.

You have your lips lightly touching and your teeth about two millimeters of space in the back. I know it sounds very complicated, but it's not. You notice what happens to your airway when you do this. Your airway is open. You're relaxed. In ancient Qigong, they thought that this was the channel that helped keep qi inside of your body. So if you want to go mystical, you can believe that.

But biologically, as far as how we are holding our tongue and our mouth, this is the most beneficial to breathing and the most relaxing too. But just like most habits, it can take a few weeks to really train yourself. So set little reminders when you're walking, always do this as well. And what about chewing? You said the food we've eaten has had a huge impact. Should we be eating differently? Yeah. Have you been to an airport lately?

Yeah, we should be eating differently for a whole number of different reasons. But one of which that people just aren't talking about too much is chewing stress. We need chewing stress. Okay, we used to chew for about two to three hours a day every single day, which is why our jaws were enormous. Our airways were huge and our sinus cavities were huge. We don't do that now. So even with healthy food, you think about healthy food, yogurt,

avocados, these are all foods I love, smoothies. There's zero chewing now. And so it's especially important for kids. Kids were weaned from breastfeeding to hard foods. Now they're weaned from a bottle to soft foods, to applesauce. So there's no chewing stress. They don't develop the proper skeletal or musculature, which is why they have a certain facial growth and that facial growth is not conducive to healthy breathing.

How early does this set in? I'm thinking as someone with a one and a three-year-old, now seems to be prime time. It is prime time. And just to be super clear, because I've gotten a lot of pushback from so many people on this, I'm not telling people what to do, and I'm not shaming anyone for doing anything. I'm just telling you what I have learned, okay?

Our ancestors, we used to be breastfed for a minimum of three years. And in some cultures, four years, five years, six years, right? When you are breastfeeding a kid, it pulls the face out, okay? They develop proper nasal breathing because they can't breathe if they're not breathing through their noses, right? And they're breastfeeding for a long time. And they're doing this how many times?

eight times a day when they're very young, 10 times a day. So this develops proper oral posture, nasal breathing from the get-go helps pull the face open. And I realize we live in a modern world that is not possible for a lot of modern mothers, which is completely fine. But when you wean a kid from a bottle,

And you wean them onto soft foods, still they're not getting that chewing stress. So this whole concept of baby-led weaning I think makes a lot of sense.

None of us would be around if our ancestors didn't chew hard foods when they were infants because that's all there was, right? They were given adult food right from the get-go. So this concept that you can only feed a baby Gerbers is just not based on any real science. It's most important earlier on for chewing, but it still makes a difference when you're older because when you chew, you help tone the airway. And when you don't chew, that airway can get

flabby, out of shape, just like any other part of your body, which makes it more apt to cause problems when you're breathing.

Are there some foods that are just great things to add to your weekly rotation that really give you a good exercise? Well, it depends if you're a keto person or a vegan person, and I'm going to get in trouble here too. Eat a carrot. Carrots are great, unless you're a keto person. A celery. I think that is keto friendly. If you're a keto person, eat some meat. Just think about all the foods that we used to eat.

The vast majority required chewing. So it doesn't need to be that complicated. For some people without TMJ issues, gum works really well, right? So you can chew gum for a couple hours a day, hard gum, sugar-free gum, no aspartame, okay? Like chew the stuff that tastes like crap that is really hard and that can have a lot of benefits to help toning up that airway. We don't need to promote specific brands, but what does someone look for a hard, bad-tasting gum brand?

I can't even imagine finding one at the store. - It would be from this Turkish gum called Filim. It's available on Amazon. It tastes awful. They have flavors like grass and carbonate, and that's the stuff I get because it's rock hard. There's no sugar, no artificial sweeteners or colors.

And you can just chew it and you get a really good workout from it. There's also mastic gum, which comes from a tree in Greece, in the Mediterranean, and people like that as well. And it's really hard. But as I told you, if you have TMJ issues, and a lot of people do, this is not good. This hard chewing, you have to get that taken care of. I'm thinking as a kid, I had braces. I did Invisalign. Are those things helpful towards breathing or are they...

helpful towards visual appeal and actually are setting us back for breathing. Well, another controversial subject. I'll tell you two schools of thought that

So dentists working today say, you know, we're straightening your teeth. You should be happy about it. Everything's fine. A lot of the dentists I've been talking to for a long time, and I would say about 50% have told me that all of these things that I had done, extractions, braces, headgear, retainers, what they do, it's like foot binding, like the ancient art of foot binding. You take a kid's mouth that's too small for his face because his teeth are crooked, right? And

And you remove teeth and then you crane the remaining teeth back and let the rest of the head grow. What's going to happen? You're going to change the kid's profile. You're also going to inhibit their airway growth. And so many dentists are saying this is one of the primary reasons so many people are suffering from breathing problems.

Because their airways have been constricted. Their jobs are set back like this because they were bound when kids were 12 or 13 or 14 or 15 when they're having these crazy growth spurts. So I think in 10 years, the vibe I'm getting is none of the stuff that we had done is going to be done to kids because of lawsuits. And it's already starting. Yeah.

It felt almost like a factory as a kid. You go to the orthodontist, there's 15 chairs around there. Everyone's getting stuff. That's what it was. They weren't looking at the individual. They weren't designing this for your face or for the airway at all.

They had one goal, straighten this kid's teeth at any cost, at any cost to their mouth, their airway, the rest of their face. And that's what they did. And this all came about in the 1940s, this production line dentistry. It was never done this way. They used to expand kids' mouths because it makes sense. Mouth's too small, teeth crooked. Let's expand the mouth. Teeth growing straight. Face develops the proper form. Airway stays open.

It's harder to do that and it costs more money. So why not get hundreds of thousands of kids, line them up and do the same thing over and over? So I know Dennis out there might be cringing at this right now. I'm not arguing for one way or the other. I'm telling you what I've learned from Dennis. I've spoken at a lot of ADA conferences as well.

So all this is changing right now. And those dentists who maybe would advocate not doing what we went through as kids, would they say just leave the teeth crooked? They would expand them. They wouldn't say leave the teeth crooked. No, not at all, because that's not good for how you look. It's not good for chewing. Right. That's a sign that your mouth is too small. So you need to make your mouth larger, not smaller. Right.

And then you realize about half the dentists are now starting to fly this flag and the other half are defending what they've done for the past few decades. But it's really starting to crumble. Anything else on the mouth we should be doing? We can work on chewing, work on exercises, work on being more aware, breathing through our nose, potentially taping our mouth.

There are specific exercises for your mouth, especially for kids, can be so beneficial. It's called myofunctional therapy. I think a branding expert needs to come in and rename that something hot because that word sucks. But these myofunctional exercises for kids, even with sleep problems or with speech problems, can be incredibly beneficial.

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We should be nasal breathers. What do we need to be doing to make that more possible? I know a lot of people are always congested, struggle breathing through their nose, even when they're not trying. Does this get even harder now that people might try to do it more intentionally? I can't offer a blanket prescription for everybody. Everyone's different and almost everyone has a specific

Specific problem with their nose that needs to be addressed in a specific way for some people they need surgery Okay, they have such a severely deviated septum or the terminates are too big or too small that they need surgery to open that up So for the vast majority of people they need to learn how to breathe through their noses in and out a lot more often and when they do that the nose can tend to open up

So it depends on who you are, where you are on that spectrum. There are a number of different hacks you can use. There are nasal dilators, breathe right strips that lift the nostrils up, create about 30% more space in the nostrils. There are things that go inside of your nose to open them up. They're called mute inserts. They tend to really help people who are snoring.

Because they allow more airflow. So sometimes the problem is with the nostrils, sometimes it's further up in the sinuses. You have to diagnose where the issue is first. One thing everyone can do without going in and getting a scan is learn how to hum more and learn how to practice nasal breathing, inhaling and exhaling. See what that does for you first before you take a further step.

I've heard you say that there's benefits to just breathing through your nose because of the way our nose is built. Yeah, if you were to take a deli slicer view of your head now, the nose takes up this huge amount of real estate, right? Has all these very ornate, intricate structures. That stuff isn't there randomly. When we take in air...

All of those structures baffle it and they clean it and they cleanse it and they defend our bodies against bacteria, viruses, allergens, and more. And when you're breathing through the mouth, you don't get any of those things, right? It's unfiltered.

everything that's in the air is just entering directly into your lungs, which is bad news. So nitric oxide, a lot of people think this is laughing gas and it's not. This is nitric, N-N-O, nitric oxide. This is a miraculous molecule that helps kill bacteria, helps kill viruses, is a vasodilator, so it opens up blood vessels.

The way that erectile dysfunction drugs work, how do they work? They work by allowing your body to release more nitric oxide. So we get six times more nitric oxide breathing in and out of our noses. When I mentioned that thing about humming, when you hum,

you get 15-fold increase of nitric oxide, which is why people who have chronic rhinitis, sinusitis, you feel a cold coming on, start humming immediately. And I think it can make

big improvement. There have not been clinical trials of there never will be, but I can say anecdotally, it's made a huge improvement for me and with hundreds of people that I've spoken to. I think about all these exercises I'm practicing breathing. One of the things that just came to mind is I feel like a lot of breathing exercises

It's like, oh, where you breathe your air into increasing capacity of your lungs, breathing into your stomach. Like, how much does that end of breath matter in all of this? I like how we're moving on down. We got the mouth. We got the nose. We're moving down to the airways. So, yeah, it's beautiful.

Once you have that nose thing figured out, number one, that's it. Because when you're breathing through the nose, you naturally will be breathing deeper. You will be breathing more slowly, more oxygen, more easily, defending your body, all that good stuff. But now, a lot of people are hunched over like this all day, for those of you listening. I am just in a very typical posture in which my shoulders are hunched forward. So even if I want to take a deep breath right now,

I really can't, I'm forced to breathe into my chest. Whereas if I sit up, it's much easier to breathe deeper. And we wanna breathe deeper 'cause the vast majority of the oxygen that we absorb is in the lower lobes of lungs, right? So it's much more efficient. You are also sending your body relaxing messages when you are breathing deeper, right? So I can give you 20 different reasons why it's so important to breathe deep.

But the majority of people breathe paradoxically, okay? And what that means is when they're breathing deep, they suck in their stomach every time they inhale. Why? Because they want to look hot, right? You have to have hot looking abs. You don't want a little paunch going on there. But this is so damaging to the body. So once you have the nasal thing figured out, place a hand on your gut. And when you breathe, yeah, that means you too, right?

You should feel a light and slight expansion of your gut. And this should be loose. Save the rock hard abs for Fort Lauderdale spring break. The rest of the time, your belly should be loose. And when you inhale, you should feel that slight expansion. And the vast majority of people say,

do not allow themselves the privilege of having a looser belly and having that deeper breath. And that's one of the reasons they're in this vicious cycle of anxiety and constant stress. Is that they're holding their stress in their stomach. Holding their stress in their stomach and the signals they're getting from the vagus nerve down here and all the other nerves and the frantic nerve that's attached to the diaphragm is that you are in a stressful, dangerous situation because you're breathing like this.

which is what we do when we get very nervous. So there's this feedback loop between your brain and your gut and the diaphragm, right? And if you're constantly sending your brain messages that you are threatened or injured, you're going to stay in that state of chronic stress. And I guess the deep lungs you said are calming. So you're kind of pushing both directions in the opposite way. Yeah. And you look at any animal in the wild and look at how it's breathing when it's calm, even when they're stressed out, they're breathing deep,

and slowly. Why should we be breathing any differently? This is what we came from. This is what we're supposed to be doing, and we've completely lost touch with it. I had a note that I missed when we were talking about the nose. They're different, left and right. They're different. This is one of the craziest things. We mentioned with the nostrils, about 30% of the population suffers from something called nasal valve collapse. This means that the tissue around the nostrils here is too loose, so when they inhale, it

It flutters, right? That's one of the reasons you can't nasal breathe. Or the nostrils themselves are too small, so you don't have enough space there to get air easily in and out. Beyond all that, our left nostrils and right nostrils influence different functions, and

in our bodies. So our left nostril breathing in and out, the heart rate will lower, blood pressure will lower, you will get calmer. The yogis believe you will get cooler. This is the cooling, softer nostrils to breathe through. When you're inhaling through your right, you're stimulating the body. Heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes up, you get hotter.

So you might say, cool, that yoga stuff is interesting, but can it be proven? Has it been tested? And the answer is yes. There's about two dozen studies that have shown, even in the brain, how this affects the brain, breathing in and out of one nostril to the other. What's interesting is there are yoga practices in which you are...

doing alternate nostril breathing. A lot of people know that, but our nostrils do this automatically. So every 30 minutes to three to four hours, they will shift primarily from the left to the right or the right to the left. So why would they do this? Why would our bodies design ourselves to do this? I think they do this as a way to help balance the body. You need more energy. Okay, it's going to shift, close off the left, shift to the right. You need to calm yourself. Okay, we're going to shift to the left.

up which is fascinating to me yeah does that mean that if you're in a state of stress you should close up a nostril and breathe through one you certainly can do that which is why that alternate nostril breathing works so well right there's studies behind that as well so breathing in and out through your left nostril and making sure you are exhaling through your right

All that stuff can really calm you down. If you don't believe me, you can check this out with whatever watch or ring you happen to be wearing. And you can see this happening in real time. So you mentioned this breathe in through one nostril out through the other. And I realized we haven't really talked about the exhale. So you said learning to breathe through your nose instead of your mouth. Where do we want to be breathing out? Hmm.

you definitely want to be exhaling through your nose because that forces you to take a slower exhale, more time to absorb more oxygen,

slower, calmer breaths. So inhaling and exhaling through the nose just like any other mammal. And is this true in all circumstances? If you're sprinting and running a race, do you change your breathing style or is it consistent across all activities? I'm talking about breathing during rest. For the vast majority of exercise, in and out through the nose is much more optimal.

optimal. If you're really cranking it up to zone four, if you're entering into zone five, you can consider breathing like

gear on a car when we had cars with gears and this is putting it in a fifth and you can consciously default to mouth breathing as a conscious action to address that moment. So there is a time and a place for everything. I'm talking about nasal breathing at rest. If you are an elite athlete and need to use that mouth breathing, that's great. If you are jogging at a medium pace and

You have no excuse to be breathing through your mouth. And I can tell you of the thousands of people I've seen jogging by, maybe about three or four of them have been nasal breathing.

and they're not doing themselves any favors mouth breathing. - And can you just tell this by watching their mouth open? - Absolutely. You can see it, right? And once you see it, you can't unsee it. So unfortunately for you, you are gonna be out looking at people jogging and looking at their mouths in airports, at restaurants. It's an awful thing. I'm trying to erase it from my brain, but here we are talking about it once again.

Are there exercises when it comes to just breathing that we can use to practice our breath? Next time you're walking, inhale for four steps and exhale for four steps. And if that's really comfortable for you, inhale for four steps and exhale for six. Try that out.

See how that feels. If it feels like you're pushing it too much, you're really out of breath, you can shorten that three and three, three and five, whatever. But breathing at this pace rhythm while you're walking allows your body to enter the state of coherence where your heart rate is locked in with your respiratory rate and everything is working like a watch. And this is what you want, especially if you're a competitive athlete. It helps you burn more fat because fat burns with

oxygen, we get more oxygen this way, helps calm you down while you're walking. If you are just sitting around, nasal breathing is 70%, 75% of good breathing because it allows you to breathe more slowly and breathe more rhythmically. It's hard to hyperventilate

It doesn't work that way, right? You breathe calmly and quietly when you're nasal breathing. If you want to add a little something to that, you can start breathing into a rhythm. What's beneficial for a lot of people is around five to six seconds in and five to six seconds out. A lot of apps that can train you. Think of it like a circle. Okay, okay, this is what the yogis do.

your inhalation and exhalation. And this doesn't mean you should stress out about it. I get a lot of comments from people down here in Silicon Valley who are stressed out about the quarter second pause between the inhale, just calm the F down and just

Breathe fluidly. Imagine as though you're breathing into that circle. Okay? That's really helpful. If you find yourself at a state of stress and you really need to dial things down, try breathing in for four, holding for eight, and out for eight. Four, eight, eight breathing can be very effective at down-regulating stress. Okay.

Okay. The method I know a lot of people in the Bay Area have talked about is like Wim Hof and these kind of more extreme breathing techniques. I often wonder if sometimes they're so advanced, people should really just have you even learned to breathe through your nose before you start to learn these things?

Do those have a place for the average person or are they kind of really edge case things that people shouldn't start with? I absolutely love those vigorous practices. I just got back a day and a half ago from a retreat that we do where there's a lot of hour long vigorous practice. Right. But we don't do that.

Until the end of the retreat, the reason is, say, 95% of the people who show up are breathing dysfunctionally. This even means like the ripped bro with tattoos and full ketosis for three months breathing so dysfunctionally. So you have to have the solid foundation of healthy breathing and healthy biomechanics before you can really get the benefits from diabetics.

that other breathwork. I'm not saying you can't just roll out of bed and do that without any programming and you won't feel something from it. You will. But if you really want to feel the full range of benefits, you have to get the rest of what a proper breath is in gear. And then you can do those more advanced breathwork systems and they really pack a punch.

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how important oxygen is for our body. Can you breathe too much or too fast? In my mind, I'm like, ooh, more oxygen equals better. Breathe faster, breathe more. I feel like that is counterintuitive. So right now, I want you to mouth breathe. This will be real quick. Don't worry. Just start mouth breathing. Start breathing too much. Yeah, more. Come on, come on, come on, come on. There. How do you feel? There's a little lightness in your head, right? There's some tingling in your fingers and your feet. Yeah.

Right. Do you think that's from more oxygen in your body? It's from a decrease of carbon dioxide and all your blood vessels start closing. So that is from a lack of blood flow to those areas. So when you are over breathing like this, you are actually inhibiting your body's ability to use oxygen. And this is something most people get wrong.

And this is something I got wrong for years and years. Because you think, well, if I eat more food, I get more calories, right? If I breathe more air, I get more oxygen. The opposite is happening. You get more oxygen by breathing very slowly.

In and out of your nose because you need that balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen to do its thing, which is why when you go to Wim Hof breathing or your vigorous pranayama or kundalini, people think, oh, you know, those moments, those five minutes where I'm just breathing, I feel so high because I have so much oxygen in my body.

You feel so high because you're blocking blood flow to your brain. That's what it's doing. And there's a reason there's a breath hold right after that because then CO2 levels go up. All that oxygen in your bloodstream that hasn't made it to your hungry cells releases. And so your body gets saturated from oxygen from a state of hypoxia to full oxygenation throughout your body.

And which is why the Wim Hof method, very ancient method, is identical to dozens and dozens of other methods that have you hyperventilate and hold your breath, hyperventilate and hold your breath. And it's so beneficial. We know that. The science is very clear on that now. What about our diaphragm? We've talked about a lot of the parts that are involved in the breathing techniques and just the whole process. But I feel like

It's a special organ. It's a special organ. The most important muscle in your body is the diaphragm. Because if something happens with that, you're just dead within a couple of minutes. So the diaphragm is what sits underneath your lungs. So the lungs don't inflate themselves. They're like wet balloons, right? They need something to do that. So as the diaphragm descends, when you inhale, the diaphragm descends here, creates a vacuum and the lungs fill up with air. And as the diaphragm relaxes,

you exhale, right? So inhaling, the diaphragm stretches out here, sinks down into our guts, and exhaling, it comes back up. You need that range of motion in the diaphragm, and most of us only use about 10% of motion of the diaphragm. If that, so a lot of people are using maybe 5%, really dysfunctional breathers. You see people start to breathe like this when they get older. It's really sad that

They're using their shoulders, right? Every breath, you see a little tension here because their diaphragms aren't moving at all. So you have to have this fluidity and this incursion and excursion of the diaphragm in order to breathe healthy. So not only is that motion of the diaphragm important for breathing healthy,

But that diaphragm pushes down on all your organs down here, okay? The intestines, the stomach, liver, all of that, and helps them purge toxins, helps them purge lymph fluid. So you need that range of motion in order for you to rid yourself of stuff and keep things moving in your organs. And so how do you start using the other 90% that's just sitting? You breathe.

You breathe deep breaths, okay? You do all the things that I just mentioned. You place your hand on your belly. You become comfortable enough with yourself that you can relax stomach. And all the go-getters that are listening to this podcast right now who are running companies, who are stressed out, who look great, you have to have flexibility in your belly, okay? You have to be comfortable with that when you inhale, okay?

There's going to be a slight extension of your belly. You will be so much happier and so much healthier if you do this. You'll look great too, so don't worry about that. So that's how you get that range of motion. You become comfortable with a deep breath. And you have to make sure that you exhale properly too. Coming back to your question, right? You said, what's up with the exhale? So most of us just tend to breathe like this.

Just packing air, packing air, packing air. So the diaphragm is just stretched out in this position. We're not exhaling.

allowing the diaphragm to come back up so exhaling and practicing long exhales is very beneficial because do you want to drive across the country and fill up your tank every time it gets down to a half a tank or you know three quarters of a tank no you want to fill it up once it's empty right because you're going to save a lot more time and effort doing that it's the same thing with our lungs

Why do we want to just keep packing air in there when we should empty them first before we fill them back up again? So another reason you should take those low, deep, slow breaths. And these are things that I imagine once you practice enough, they just become natural, right? You're not thinking while we're talking today, oh, I've got to take a deep breath. Oh, I don't want to suck in my stomach. It just becomes habit. And

all of the benefits we talked about earlier start to unfold in life. Nobody wants to have to think about this stuff. No one wants another checkbox to have to go through every day. I mean, think about the number of supplements we're supposed to be eating right now, along with sleeping, along with everything else.

But it can take months to develop good habits, right? After doing this stuff and learning this stuff and being shamed by so many breathwork teachers for so long, I don't have to think, I know I'm nasal breathing throughout the day. I know I'm nasal breathing at night because I'm using tape. I know I'm breathing deeply and I'm breathing slowly. But that took a long time to get there. So the point is to build these good habits, to work at the beginning so you don't have to think about it.

This is how we're designed to breathe. This is the natural way. We're relearning what we were supposed to have been doing, right? So it's not like some new fangled development that we'll learn 10 years later is bad for us. This is the right way of doing it because this is the way nature has designed us to breathe. How quickly would someone start to see some impact of doing this? Do you think 30 seconds?

You find me someone who's suffering from severe anxiety or panic or even asthma who is breathing extremely dysfunctionally because they all are. And you teach them how to take a slow breath, something most of them have never been taught how to do. And you teach them how to relax their shoulders a bit, relax their stomach a bit,

And you see this calm come over them within a minute that can be transformative for a lot of people. And some of them after a few minutes to start crying because they've never felt this before because no doctor has ever told them anything about this.

So I think that these fundamentals, these very simple things anybody can do. If it's not right for you, if you want to go back to bronchodilators, SSRIs, that's totally fine. There's no judgment on that. However, you should give your body a chance to balance first before you make up your mind. And one other thing we didn't talk about was posture.

And it's funny when I'm sitting here, I'm constantly very, very self-conscious as well here. So two self-conscious guys trying to have the best posture. How important is it to sit correctly to be able to breathe correctly? It's so important when we're hunched over, especially if we have a laptop and we're at a cafe or hunched over like this. Even if you wanted that diaphragm to descend, if that was your intention, you can't do it

because you've cut it off, right? You've forked it off. You can only breathe into the chest. And you can get by doing this, but it's not healthy. In the Tao 1,200 years ago, there's this quote that talked about how form dictates breathing and breathing dictates posture. So of course, those two things are connected. You wanna be able to breathe that low, slow breath. And so you have to have the posture that's conducive to doing that. And what about work standing desks?

Is standing more instead of sitting more solve a lot of these problems? It solves a lot of the posture breathing problems. I'm a huge fan of standing desks. And even if I don't want to do it, I make myself do it. And I go back and forth throughout the day. And that's the wonders of having these desks that are very adjustable. So it solves a lot of these problems. Not all of them, but a lot of them. It allows the diaphragm to descend properly.

It allows you to take a proper exhale, makes you more conscious of your breathing. So I think there's so many good reasons to use a standing desk and breathing function and biomechanics is just one of them.

Any other things, devices, products people could have on hand to just aid in this entire journey? I take no money from any of these companies. Okay. Just to be totally clear, maybe I should or should have a few years ago. So the nasal strips can be really beneficial for people who suffer from snoring. Okay. And you can try those out when you're jogging as well. You say, I can't breathe in and out of my nose. Try one out.

They have them that are flesh colored, right? If you're self-conscious about it, but no one's looking at you anyway. So wear one of those. That can really help. Sprays are good for chronic congestion. Neti pots. I get a lot of benefit from those. I also carry around these sprays. I fly around a lot. And, you know, that's how you can

be exposed to a lot of different viruses and bacteria. So I'm a fan of those. Beyond that, what other tools can you use? There are dozens and dozens of different things. Those are the primary ones, the good training wheels to help you build that solid foundation. I would start. And when you say sprays, do you mean nasal mist of saline or do you mean ones with drugs in them? You know, Afrin, those kinds of things. Ah, so saline and xylitol. Those are the ones I use.

And also for more heavy duty stuff, if you know you've been exposed to something in the air or if you're around a bunch of people of COVID, some have a small dose of iodine in it that can be really beneficial. So you just have to assess, do you constantly have congestion? And if the answer is yes,

There's a number of things you can do. And those sprays are one of them. Also humming. I know I mentioned it once. It can be really beneficial. You're not going to hear about this because there are zero amount of dollars that are to be made by telling people to hum. However, there's two different companies right now that have devices. And guess what these devices do? They're FDA cleared devices. They've been shown to work. Guess what they do? They make your nose hum.

They hum for you. They hum for you. Okay. You put them on your face and they hum for you at a resonant frequency of around 120 Hertz, which is for most heads is the most productive for nitric oxide. But you can just hum a B2 on a piano and it does the same thing. Or you can strap this thing on your face, which is totally fine too. Again, no judgment, of course, no judgment. Of course.

One aspect of breath we haven't talked about, and I know you wrote a book on freediving, and we haven't talked about holding your breath. Is there any benefit other than for sports like freediving to actually learn to hold your breath longer? Is that something we should also be training? There is a reason why all of the ancient Qigong methods that date back thousands of years, breath holding is center.

along with breathing slowly, nasal breathing, all the things we talked about. There is a reason why if you look at ancient yoga practices, pranayama practices, pranayama means the cessation of breath.

Okay, holding your breath. We can build more EPO, which helps us build more red blood cells. We can build blood vessels. We can release more P53 and HIF1 if you're getting really technical things that have been shown that can help defend us against cancer and other issues. Five maximum breath holds over a course of five minutes.

shoots up your EPO by something like 23%. It's some crazy. An EPO? Erythropotene, okay? Not protein. People often get that wrong, and I certainly do as well. But that is what triggers the release and the growth of red blood cells. So you can carry more oxygen more easily. One of the reasons why athletes go to altitude, they do altitude training, is to build blood. You can do that by breath holding. So there are so many reasons to hold your breath.

And all of them are good. There's kind of two versions. One is just hold your breath to the extent you can. And one is we've all been snorkeling or many people have. It's like, well, wow, if I could hold my breath for three minutes, I could do more. How important is the longevity of the breath hold versus just doing it? I'm going to do a little self edit here. So conscious breath holding.

So many benefits. Conscious breath holding. Unconscious breath holding, something called emo apnea or continuous partial attention syndrome is very bad for you. This is a fear response. Okay. When you are nervous about something, someone says something that upsets you, you look at your email, your boss is yelling at you, you hold your breath. That's a fear response. People do that throughout the day. That's very bad. Unconscious breath holding, sleep apnea, unconscious breath holding, very bad. So unconscious

I hope I made that extremely clear. When you're willing yourself, when you are making the decision to

To take a big breath of air and hold your breath, there are so many benefits to be done by that because you're doing it in a very controlled way and you're only doing it a few times. You're not doing it throughout the day. So what else does breath holding do for you? It allows you to hold your breath. If you get really good at it, hold your breath for five, six, seven minutes at a time. And if you're able to do that, you have this secret key that only few people have that allows you to unlock the wonders of the underwater world.

A lot of people who are scuba divers think that they also have this key, and they do to a certain extent. I've been a scuba diver for decades. But when you are a breath-hold diver, when you are a free diver, you're able to enter into the underwater world in complete silence.

And so all of the other life forms come up to you and interact with you because they think you belong down there. You're not loud huffing and puffing like you have a leaf blower out, right? And disturbing everything. And this is how you get access to dolphins come up. They start communicating with you. It's like some new age dream whales come up to you. It's just such a

beautiful thing. It's something I discovered how to do about 12, 13 years ago. I learned how to free dive from some of the best people in the world. And it's something I think about all the time and can't wait to do more often. I think some people might think learning to hold your breath for five, six minutes is something that was genetic and gifted. Is there a training protocol that anyone could learn to do that? Anyone in reasonable health, give me 45 minutes and I'll

And I will get them holding their breath for around three minutes, three and a half minutes. I've seen this time and time again. And then after a week or two, you're holding your breath for four minutes to five minutes.

If it takes 45 minutes to explain, tell people where they can go, because I'm sure you said, give me 45 minutes and I can do it. And I'm sure your phone's not open for everyone. No, no, don't call me. I'm not a certified freedive teacher. So when I was talking about Qigong, I was talking about pranayama, I was talking about breathwork, Wim Hof method.

A lot of people do Wim Hof method, which is fantastic. The breath hold by around third or fourth round is three minutes, four minutes. People are nailing that within the second or third time they've done the Wim Hof method, right? So this is a matter of relearning things that your body automatically knows how to do.

So if you want to learn how to do this, you can do Wim Hof method. You can take free diving training. Free diving training is so beneficial for not only that access to the underwater world, but it teaches you about your lungs. It allows you to have better lung capacity. It allows you to stretch out your diaphragm. It allows you to enter into a meditative state wherever you are, whenever you want, because it focuses on the breath, right? You can't free dive without

And you can't hold your breath unless you know how to breathe properly. You have to really access that lung volume in order to hold your breath for five, six, seven, eight minutes.

The freediving I'm talking about is listening to your body. It's not turning off the messages your body is sending. It's listening to it. Whenever you need to breathe, when you're freediving recreationally, you just go up to the surface and breathe. You don't say, I can go down another 100 feet even though I really need to breathe. You're attuned to your body. And when you're attuned to your body, I think, yes, I think that this is a safe activity to do if you listen to your body, right? Your body's really smart.

You have to be conscious of that. And also what it allows you to do is be in a place where there's no cell phones, where there's no distractions at all. You are alone. You are in complete quiet. You are surrounded by nature. And it's just such a magical thing. And I would say from my experience, I'm probably not at five minutes, but maybe a minute or two.

It turns the average kind of, I don't know, Hawaii snorkel adventure into something 10 times more interesting because everyone's kind of at the top looking down and you're down looking around and exploring like scuba diving, but in a much more casual, less expensive, easy to do setting. You'd be amazing where you can go in one minute. Okay. You'd be amazing the adventure that you can have in one minute of being weightless, uh,

of cruising around, of having fish come up to you, going down even 30 feet and sitting on the seafloor and just sitting there for a minute and having everything come around you and swirl around you and have them not be threatened by you, but being accepted as someone who belongs in the ocean. I'm very excited. Last thing, I mentioned kids a few times.

Anything specific I should be doing at a young age or at any age for someone kids to help them with this? Just practicing the same breathing techniques or any of them not safe for kids to do? Yeah. Don't do Wim Hof with your three year olds. Right.

Something that a lot of people aren't talking about, there is an epidemic of sleep dysfunction breathing, very dysfunctional breathing for kids. And that is directly related to ADHD. So if you go into your kid's room at night and you hear them breathing, if you see them breathing with an open mouth, if they are holding their breath, if they are snoring, these are serious warning signs.

And if you don't do anything about it, we know that this directly leads to developmental problems in the brain and in the body. It can inhibit growth, bone growth, and more. So it's such a serious problem. A lot of people aren't even talking about it because they don't know about it. So assess your kid's breathing health as early as you possibly can. And if they have a problem, if they're breathing dysfunctionally, you can absolutely fix it, right? They're kids, they're malleables.

They're bendable. With the right input, they can improve. So that's something I would really focus on. If your kid does not have any of those issues, if they're breathing normally, if they're a nasal breather, you can try breathing exercises with them. You can try humming exercises with them. They freaking love it because their bodies respond instantly to this, especially when they're crying, when they're stressed out. When I was a kid, it used to be...

Hold your breath and count to 10. Then respond to me. That's a breath hold. It works really well. I'm going to sneak into my kid's room tonight and listen to their breathing. I'm really interested in this. One final thing I'll mention about that. There's various apps. Again, I'm not getting paid by any of these apps. There's Snore Lab. There's Snore Clock.

You can place your phone in your kid's room and it records their breathing throughout the night and then gives you a graph readout. You don't have to go and listen to it. It gives you a readout of where they are on the scale of breathing. And that is one quick way. It's not perfect, but it's a general assessment of how they're breathing throughout the night. I would highly suggest parents do that. It's free.

Can you do it for yourself also? Yes, you can do it for yourself. It's not just for kids. It's an app. You can do it for yourself. And this is one thing when people say, especially people who are single, right? They don't have a spouse or a partner saying, you've been snoring throughout the night. They're like, no, bro, I breathe great. You know, I'm focused on everything else. Use this app and let the app decide how good you're breathing. Because you can go back in both of these apps. I think there's three or four of them. And you can listen to yourself breathing throughout the night. So if you're hearing...

It's really bad news. And you have to get that fixed. So try those apps. Snore Clock is one. It's totally free. Snore Lab is another. They have a paid version. They have a free version. Again, I'm not getting paid by any of these apps, but I've used them both. And I've really been impressed with them. Wow. Okay.

Okay. We didn't touch on everything. The book you have is incredible. Where can people go who want to get more? I have a website, which I need to update sometime at mrmrjamesnester.com because some other James Nestor in Michigan took the real one. So that's what I'm stuck with. I also try to do the Instagram thing. I'm not so hot at that either, but I'm posting to both of these

All the latest research I'm finding, easy tips. It's all free. There's no paywall. Come on over and I'll tell you what I'm learning along the way. Yeah, I'll link to both those. I'll link to the book. James, thanks for being here. Thanks a lot for having me.

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