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The Lost Art of Breath with James Nestor

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Creative Live. I'm Chase founder, CEO and founder, CEO of Creative Live and your host for the next hour. I am so fired up for today's conversation before we get into the guest, which is for whom I know you're here. I want to welcome you. And wherever you're watching this, we Simon stream all over the Internet at YouTube, live at Facebook Live uh, in Instagram Live, even Twitter slash periscope and, of course, on the class page at Creative Live or Creative live dot com slash tv. That's where the best experiences is the best experiences on its where I see your comments first. So if you're on one of those pages and you click join chat, I get those questions and I can share those with the guest. And that being said, if you are on Facebook or YouTube, live or wherever, I do see your comments there just a little bit delayed. But I'm excited to be able Thio elevate some of those questions so that our guests can see them and respond to you. Um, and that interact...

ivity that live component eyes Ah, huge benefits. So I wanna make sure that I invite you to participate there. And if you're watching or listening to this downstream, Uh, it's my experience that most of the people who are asking questions here have had a lot of the same questions in mind that you do as you're listening. Um, so that's how as a community, we create the most valuable piece of content. But it just gives me great pleasure to welcome you today to creative live. Um, there's nothing more important to our health and well being than breathing, right? It's something we do 25,000 times a day. We take care in, we let it out. And yet, as a species, we have largely lost the ability to breathe correctly, and the consequences are serious. Now, if what I'm saying to you is a little bit of curved while you're like what? I'm really normally introducing our guest. James Nestor James is a journalist. He travels the whole world trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. He's written for outside Scientific American, the Atlantic Dwell, The New York Times and lots of other publications. He's got a couple of books, one where I originally became acquainted with his work was in his book Deep, which is about free diving, the renegade science and what the ocean tells us about ourselves. That was a finalist when all kinds of awards, Um, and a follow up to that book, I saw him in all these different media channels and media outlets. And then when I found out that he was writing a book about breath the new science of a lost art, I was immediately captivated. Got an advanced copy. And lucky for all of us that Mr James Nestor is joining us today to celebrate his New York Times bestselling book and to help us breathe better, which will make our lives richer. So, please, wherever you are in the world, tap your desk, tap a key or to give a shout out to Mr James. Nestor James, Welcome to the show. I am very happy because I got a lot of questions. This is I was sharing with you just before we turned on the cameras. Uh, lifelong believer in visualization, um, passionate about mindset and personal health and wellness meditating for five or seven years now, and breath is the elusive. Um, I haven't had an explanation for why I feel better. Why? I perform better on DWhite I It matters, but I know it does. And so to have you on the show today brings me a lot of joy. And I know we've got people tuning in from all over the world right now. I right away, I see Australia. I don't know what time it is on Australia, but it seems like it's got to be either early or late. New York, New Jersey, the tri state area. We've got a Texas in the house. Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. Anyway, worldwide audience excited to hear from you today. Andi, I want to start out with what in the world made you study breath, breath of all of the things you can study studying free diving before and, um, so many different. Um, I know some of different things. Why breath? Well, it started when I was talking to free divers. Who are these athletes who have managed to train themselves to take a single breath of air and dive down 203 100 ft on, Come back to the surface, conscious and fine. So beyond just the competitive side of free diving. I was fascinated with the act of holding your breath for so long what that required. And they said that the only way to hold your breath for some of these people were holding their breath for 89 10 minutes. What was to breathe properly, and the applications for that extended beyond just deep diving. Um, there were a bunch of other benefits to really harnessing breathing, and they were claiming that it helped you heal disease. It could help you get rid of snoring. It could help you do these superhuman feats, and all of this sounded pretty much like little tall tale ish to May. So I went out in the field and talked to the researchers and experts and found out that so much of what they had told me it was actually true. Well, you do a nice job of opening the book, describing someone who has, uh, live the life that I think a lot of the folks who were listening in and then we just had Serbia join Trinidad's in the house. Dallas, Istanbul. So a lot of folks from all of the world where raised on I don't know, mediocre food, sort of sugary, mass produced stuff. Um, you talk a lot in the book about the shape of the mouth. I had my wisdom teeth out at 17 and you captured me right away early on in the book with describing basically what my childhood was like, the thoughts around what I was eating, what my breath was like, what? My life was like the doctors and the dentist. What they thought of my mouth. And I was horrified to find out that you and I were in the same camp and that you had been, um you know, as you subjected yourself to these studies, that I'm probably a lot like you. So how broadly is the problem of not breathing properly? And you know what? Did your studies lead you to understand about our culture? Well, when I first started researching this s o, many scientists were telling me that the vast majority of us don't breathe correctly, which doesn't make any sense to me because I'm alive. I'm breathing. I figured breathing is you know, it's doing its job if you're alive. I was concerned that I was breathing not how to breathe, but What they said is the how of breathing is as important as how much you exercise what you eat. Whatever jeans you had, um, inherited. So So I thought that was interesting. And then they broke it down. The facts and the numbers of how poorly we're breathing right now, if you look at asthma, 25 million Americans have asthma. Half of a snow, or about a quarter of us, have sleep apnea. About a quarter of us suffer from chronic hyperventilation. Another court to suffer from COPD. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. And then I started actually thinking about it and listening Thio. People who are around me and watching what was happening and and even people who are healthy, even weightlifters thes super buff dudes are all oiled up. Huge bodies. Those guys die in their forties and fifties because they're not breathing properly because they suffer from sleep apnea. They have constriction in their throat. So this was a real wake up call because this wasn't what I thought I was gonna be writing the book about. And it sent me down a severe left turn. But I kept digging into it and turned. It turned out that there was a pretty interesting story in there. Well, let's get into that story. You You open the book, um, with subjecting yourself to a study Where you at first tape, you're you plug your nose and mouth breathe for a It was like a a week. I forget. It was 100 10 days. Yeah, 200 years ago. I'll never forget those days on and then on. Then you reciprocate the the the plugging of the nostrils with the taping shut of the mouth during sleep at night. And what did that reveal to you? What? You know, we're getting a little bit detailed here, but I just It seems like such an extreme test to go through to not breathe out of your nose for 10 days. Um, and what I want to do is I want to just basically retrace some of the science that gets us to what you now know about the book or about the breath and what you've put in the book so that we can then apply it to the lives of people like Dylan James and Rick Squires and Karen Price and Tanya cyclic who are listening and watching from all over the world right now. So I have been talking with Doctor Jacque R. Nayak, who is the chief of Ren ology research at Stanford, and he was talking about nasal breathing and how essential it is toe health. And this guy's really one of the world's authorities on the science of nasal breathing, all the functions I've never thought about nasal breathe. I always thought, if I could do it cool if not breathe through my mouth, no problem. That's why we have a mouth. And he said, Absolutely not that that is not okay. So he explained to me that when we breathe through our nose were ableto filter air, condition it to our body, he humid if I it and make it so that when it enters our lungs, it enters in a condition that will be very easily absorbed and won't irritate our lungs because the lungs air in many ways an external organ. They're exposed our environment wherever we go. So for constantly inflicting them with different pathogens or different temperatures of air, they're gonna get irritated. And that's where a lot of respiratory problems they're gonna happen. So So that's That's the main problem with mouth breathing. But he mentioned Hey, didn't know how quickly that that damage came on. I said, Well, why don't you Why don't you test it out? He thought it would be unethical because he knew that it was going to cause some seriously. So I I volunteered to do it a study. And, you know, our intention was never to do like some prank jackass thing. It was 25 to 50% of the world population. That's an estimate. Breathes through its mouth, right? So we're lowering ourselves and do a position that so many people already knew that mouth breathing has been implicated and correlated Thio. So many problems, from snoring to sleep apnea, toe, asthma and allergies on and on. So that's what we did. We plug our noses me and one other subject of breathing therapist from from Sweden. One of the world's better breathers made him, you know, just like everyone else and we measured did 60 different data markers and measured before and after. And what did you find out? Well, way new mouth breathing was gonna be bad, but we just didn't know it was gonna be this bad. So I went from starring about our baselines. I had about three or four minutes of snoring the night for per eight hours. Not not bad. And there's a zero within a night that increased over 1000%. Within three nights, we were both snoring half the night. So four hours a night. We both got sleep apnea, so we were extremely fatigued. My blood pressure went up about 15 points. Um, Anders went up a little bit. Not as much as that. I mean, I could just give you this laundry list of problems are athletic. Endurance went way down, heart rate variability sunk. I mean, everything. Body temperature, lowered everything. And if we would have kept doing that, I'm sure that some chronic malady would have afflicted us for for sure. And that the most amazing thing tow us with this whole study is once 10 days is a long time. Maybe, maybe not in day to day life when you've got crapping in your nose, it's it's awful. The first couple of days were like This is so bad then, like the 8th, 9th day. I mean, we were really starting to our bodies were starting to suffer some. It's, um, really issues. So the the night we took that off and started using a little piece of tape on our mouths just breathing through our nose, storing completely disappeared, sleep happening, completely disappeared. My blood pressure went down about 10 to 15 points and kept going down after that heart rate variability store. I mean, on and on and on. So this is something that I just don't see or I didn't see then. Now I'm starting to see people talking about the correlation between snoring and the channel in which we breathe Correlation between sleep apnea. You have sleep apnea, you're given a CPAP you told you snoring and just like Oh, you're an old man store going another room. But so much of that is tied to nasal breathing versus mouth breathing. And and, you know, there was a bunch of other discoveries that we found, but but those were the most significant, like how we breathe really matters. It's not just that you're breathing, you got to do it the right way. Well, I'm gonna be really bold here and say, culturally, you picked an amazing time to start talking about a very important subject. George Floyd was killed because he couldn't breathe. We're in the middle of a pandemic that attacks the lungs and makes it so we can't breathe. And what I'm hoping to do in the next 40 minutes is toe. Have you help us understand how the research that you've done can help us live our best lives? I want some specific. I wanna. I want some exercises that you could share with the group. I want to understand some of the benefits just besides the one you've you've shared right there. And maybe you could start off with, um, as you mentioned in the early in the book. And I already hinted at, you know, I was raised on, you know, processed foods and no disrespect to my parents or my culture. Like I just was raised on that stuff. And Dennis says, Hey, you got some Mueller teeth coming in the back. These wisdom teeth, you know, I had two of them were impacted, You know, each one of those things came out in four or five pieces. Big surgery put me completely under. And you know, I can't even imagine how Maney dentist visits. I've had teeth pulled all this stuff. So if I'm let's just say middle of the road What? What can I start doing now to repair this? Ultimately, you know my life 40 something years of not thinking about it correctly. The first thing to do is acknowledge that this is not your fault. It's not your parents fault. It's, you know, this is something that that happened to us as a culture. And also we have to acknowledge that there's I had the same exact thing as you did, as I'm sure tens of millions of other people in the US And this was just like I'm getting my wisdom tooth that Oh, you're in headgear. Oh, yeah, braces. There's nothing normal about this because if you took an ancient skull, any skull older than 500 years old, there was a very good chance, like a 99% chance its teeth are gonna be perfectly straight. These people never had their wisdom teeth removed. They never had braces or Invisalign or anything. Their teeth were perfectly straight because they had these big commanding jaws. And if you have a big jaw and a wide mouth that's a wide enough to accommodate all of your teeth. Your airway is gonna be larger, and we know that. So what? You're what you suffered from what I suffered from is you know, this approach that we need. Thio make our teeth straight, so we need to remove teeth to cram them into a mouth that's already too small and make it smaller. So the teeth are straight. And that's been shown to be strongly correlated to additional airway problems beyond the ones that we had before. So you know what I try to do in the book is to say, there's a problem. It's all science. It's in the skeletal record. You can see it for yourself. There's videos out. I learned this stuff from leaders in the field. Stanford, Harvard, University of Penn. People top people. That's that's not to me, really controversial. It's What's interesting is that once you identify the problem, you can say, Okay, we're messed up. Now how do we fix it? How do we use our bodies to fix it? And that starts with recognizing that breathing is a foundation of health, and if you're not doing it right you're never really gonna be healthy, and then it can go on from there. So I think it's that realization and the acknowledgement you've got to start with started the beginning. Now. I mentioned, uh, early on also that I'm, ah, meditator. And, um, there are all kinds of different schools of meditation. Sometimes you focus on the breath. Um, I am a t m practice ER, which is focused on a mantra, but I've gotten all kinds of value from it. And so it's fair to say that through my experience there that I've tapped into it. I also friend of Tony Robbins. Tony has talked about his prime ing where he's breathing through the nose on that's borrowed from a bunch of different traditions. Um, let's so I'm not throwing rocks at my parents. My mom's probably watching this show right now. Mom did all you could. Don't you know Dr Nestor's let us off the hook here. But what? So what can we start to do that where if you're me, where where do we start? I want I want peak physical condition. I want you know, my body and my blood oxygen, and I want my brain to work. I want to be the best version of myself. And yet, with something that's so simple, as you said we take for granted, I don't even know what I mean. I've read the book, so I know. But you know the folks at home again. Dylan James, Karen Price, Kathy Johnston, Johnny Costello. They want to know where to start. So where do we start? Let's build that foundation. Just to be clear, I'm not a doctor, even though I like quite quite nice. I was science fearless, and I'm not a breathing therapist. So I went into this world with zero slant. I went in to report on this stuff, and if I had discovered that mouth breathing was actually healthier than nasal breathing, I would have probably had like, That's a real scoop. Everyone like that would be a real killer story. But I didn't write. I looked at the data. I talked to the experts in the field. Having said that, I picked up some tricks along the way. So the first one is breathe through your nose. I don't care if you say, Oh, my, my nose is always clogged. I can't do I'm not getting enough air when I'm running. You could breathe through your nose. Very few people need surgical intervention. Some do. Absolutely. But breathing therapists in Ireland told me of the thousands of people that he's taught that we're talking thousands, many thousands, four actually couldn't breathe through their nose after weeks of trying. So you're gonna vastly increase your endurance, you're gonna increase your recovery. You are gonna be able to fight off pathogens and bacteria and even viruses more efficiently every time you breathe through your nose instead of your mouth. Your you are increasing oxygenation 20% in each breath. So that means you need to You can breathe less on by breathing less. You're going to slow down your heart rate by slowing down your heart rate. You're gonna remove the burden on your art. By doing that, you're gonna lower your blood pressure. So all of these things are related, especially if you're a jogger or someone who's really in doing during its athletics. Breathing through the nose is going to give you a huge advantage. It could take weeks toe acclimated to that, but but stick with it and there are some therapists and their studies and showing that the massive gain. So that would be rule number one. Um, I could start with another one unless you have the O on this. This is kind of how I set up the book. By starting with these foundations. The next one is to to exhale fully. That doesn't mean Thio. I know there's some super doers listening to your podcast out there. Don't push it with breathing. I want you to slowly acclimate your body to this stuff. You can push it later once you're acclimated. But but imagine. You know, if you've never run a marathon, if you've only walked around the block, you're not going to go run, run a marathon that's gonna mess up your body. Same thing with when I say a full exhale, I mean, very calmly lifting that diaphragm and then letting it sink back down when you inhale. And by doing that, every time it sinks down, you're gonna put more blood into your thoracic cavity. When the diaphragm goes up and you exhale, that blood is gonna push through your heart. So this diaphragm is the secondary pump to your heart. What you want to do is is really reduce the burden, the effort on the heart. Why do you want it to be over? Worked all the time, pushing against inflammation? Blood pressure going up? No, You want it to be nice and easy as long as you can. So just by doing this this researcher that that I found in the 19 fifties who is a vocal teacher taught emphysema mix, these people in va hospitals have been left for dead. They had no way of treating them. They give them antibiotics and oxygen and put them all in the same room, just horrific, simply by training them how to breathe. By extending their diaphragmatic motion, he was able to heal these people better than than any other therapy. And this was never denied. There's X rays showing it. There's Pollan ologists who have verified this over and over. This is something we can all dio, so exhale more because the inhaling ZZ people tend to be like, Can you get that big inhale in? But it's not doing much good unless you get that all their out. So so those the the first two nasal and exhale. So I think everybody wants to feel better. Everybody wants Thio live better. And I'm just looking at the comments right now, like Kathy's a stylist and she's wearing a mask all day now. And she's realizing that breathing through her nose fogs of her glasses. So she's started intentionally mouth breathing. And you know, we got Karen Price here. She's got sleep apnea, and when you say all right, I'm gonna give you a couple things to do. Is it just the conscious effort of these things? Or there's some exercises that you thought that you will want to prescribe. Or do you recommend that people go, go see, uh, a therapist or a doctor to help with that strategy? Or do you feel like, you know, having studied this as you have for the book, um, that you could give us some more specific pointers than just learn how to exhale and breathe through your nose? What's your What's your prescription? I know you're not a doctor. Give a prescription to to start off with. Everyone's different, right? So so different People have different levels of breathing problems. Some might have minor problems. Some have major problems. There's a bunch of different tests you can do to figure out where you are on that scale and those different problems, they're gonna be addressed differently, depending on what you have. So it's hard for me to say, Oh, you've got sleep apnea. Do this. You're gonna be OK. What I can do is tell you that certain people who have had mild to moderate sleep apnea who focused on nasal breathing using a little piece of mouth tape I'm not talking about taping your whole mouth a teeny little piece on your lips. I have shown improvement, especially with snoring as well. Orel, Fair and Geul exercises have been shown to be very effective with snoring and sleep apnea. I'm not saying for everyone, especially if you have central sleep apnea, which is a problem in the brain and not obstructive sleep apnea to two different things. Um, see, paths are are wonderful, amazing devices that have allowed people who have been choking on themselves for so long to get a good night's sleep and to get oxygen. So they're they're wonderful, but they're not doing anything to fix the core problem, right? And so what? What? I think we need to focus on if you're talking about long term health, is fixing that core problem. Sometimes surgeries is what you need for sleep apnea. Sometime it's it's meditation or different exercises. But there's a whole range of different things that I just don't feel comfortable prescribing. You know, 11 size fits all thing, because it doesn't. But I think that even, even just the urging folks toe, you know, you mentioned earlier ou snow or go in the other room or whatever. I want people to who are listening and watching right now. And if you're just now joining us, I'm here with James Nestor talking about his book breath, which, uh, is it was It's such an eye opening book to read, and it's also a page turner for whatever it's worth, You just do a beautiful job of, you know, I've been devouring the thing, and it's when you start to understand. You know, I started like thinking back in my history and, you know, again, I'm reading in the comments right now. So many people either snore or get poor sleep or have sleep apnea or, you know, like, um Kathy Kathy the stylist, and she's like adapting to breathe through her mouth. You know, given we're in the middle of a pandemic and it's hard when you have a mask on like it seems so pervasive, you know, Is this, um yeah, like why? Why is this not more common? Why, Like it seems like you've just uncovered this thing. And yet, you know, you look back thousands of years ago all kinds of different traditions talking about breath, you know, Is there some eyes there some higher power telling us that you're someone's trying to get an angle on, not breathing so they could make a bunch of money And like, Why? Why is this so late to be popularized? I think that it's it's so stunning and somewhat ironic to be having this conversation here. And you say this now, considering for the last years that I've been working on this book, I've told my friends. Yeah, I'm working on this book about breathing Like what? What? What do you want to write a book about breathing? What are you talking about? Um, and this is what these researchers Christian gmo ATT's Stanford has been looking at infant and childhood breathing and correlating it to a D H D and autism. And he's been doing this for fifth three years and no one's been listening and his science, his work is irrefutable. So these are the conversations I had with these with these experts in the field for years, and it seems, finally, that there is. There is. People are starting to wake up of what an important and essential thing. This is the fact that we've accepted snoring and sleep apnea to be common problems. It's just like a got got my story and got my sleep apnea on. You know, that's that's just these air, not these air things that have just in the last 30 years have have gone viral over our population and and they're having a severely damaging effect on on our health across the board. And there's a again, there's no controversy about that. So the question is, what do you do with it? Um, considering there's so many different permutations just for sleep apnea. What what I'm doing Because I'm not a breathing therapist because I'm not a doctor. I'm inviting doctors to do Q and A's on on my website. This isn't a way to move traffic to my website. So no, I'm I saw one on your instagram. They're free to everybody. No one selling you anything. But I'm having the reason I mention this because Dr Steven Park, who was I would consider the world's authority on sleep apnea and CPAP and other sleep disordered breathing. I'm gonna be doing an interview with him in about 10 days. So we're taking questions from from anyone. He will be able to answer that the specific you know, methods in which you can help improve, improve your health and breathing. Now I love it. And I saw on your instagram channel I think what the doctor's name was, but again, just just bringing that. Bringing the topic Toe Light is part of what has been eso eye opening to me. You talked in the book. I believe the word was de evolution Or was that right? De evolution? And it's like that we're literally going backwards now and and how is that? And why Mhm so that the term that that was used Daniel Lieberman, who's book is right here 600 pages. Pretty heavy stuff. He called it dis evolution. This evolution evolution is always moving like everyone always thinks that evolution. That means progress. It does not. It means movement. It means change, right? So dis evolution is you're still moving. You're just not going towards progress. You veered off. And if you look at the human species, that's exactly what's happened to us. So this idea that, you know, all evolution is moved by survival of the fittest were only inheriting traits that are advantageous. No, no, not at all True. And this is especially true with our breathing. And just as I had mentioned, those huge, powerful jaws are cave people ancestors never needing braces, having perfectly straight teeth, huge nasal apertures. They breathe differently that these huge Sinuses too. Then then we do now. So So the problem is, is no now. But But again, what? What can you do about that? And considering that the many different problems we have for breathing, I can't offer blanket solutions. But I can't identify different ways. People have helped themselves, which is what I tried to focus on from asthma, emphysema, Thio, athletic endurance. You know that that kind of thing for the mass for the one viewer who's breathing out of the Mass now breathing through through the mouth. I would That's super inconvenient. I would suggest probably not doing that. Dr. Louis Ignarro won the Nobel Prize in the nineties for his work with nitric oxide, and he found that nitric oxide which is produced. Guess where Right here in our nose, we produced six times more, a six fold increase in our nose. Just breathing through the nose is very effective at fighting off bacteria pathogens. And guess what Viruses? Uh, he said that it interacts directly with viruses and they've done studies looking at stars in Petri dishes in with mammalian cells and found that those cells will survive so much longer in the presence of nitric oxide and which is one of the reasons right now that E. R s and and other medical institutions are giving people of Covic, guess what? Nitric oxide. They're having them inhale it. But we could make our own right here in our noses. So if she's able to get a mask or some sort of situation and continue, um, by mask, I mean, one of those those shields. Shields? Yeah, shield visors. Uh, it would be better nasal breathing. Extremely important. especially for now. Yes. Well, again, this this I'm looking at the comments and we've got people on all these different platforms. Um, talking about Wow. I thought snoring was normal. I was told that my straining my teeth wouldn't affect my breathing, that it would help my mouth shape. I would like Donna. Now she's by the way. She's a fan of the fresh air podcast. She's a physical therapist and Pilates instructor and talking about how core these concepts are, too, you know, physical fitness. And and it's just shocking to me that something that's fundamentalist breathing has been so misunderstood. This you mentioned the concert I asked you about the concept of dis evolution and that we're actually, um, you know, moving away from these adaptations or the our previous biology. That was very, very helpful. And is it because of dentistry? Is it because of, um, like, why are we dis evolving? Yeah, I think there's too many guilty parties. You can't pin it on one thing. I just want to make it. I was just going to go after my dentist. Dr Michael, I'm coming for you. Um, but but just toe to talk about how it's been misunderstood and not acknowledge. A point that you made and that the other viewer had mentioned is these breathing has been a foundation of almost every major culture for the past 3000 years. Right, if you look back toe, ancient Hindu culture, breathing. But that's what it was all about. There was a medicine. If you look into thio ancient Chinese culture that there's seven books of the Dow written entirely on breathing, all the bad things that will happen if you breathe through your mouth and all the good things that will happen if you breathe through your nose and do some other practices the ancient Greeks were onto. It s so it Zbynek like an integral part of so many different systems. And yet in the past, you know, 100 years 200 years of industrialization is just fallen by the wayside. So So I just want to mention that, but to answer your specific question about, you know, dentistry and breathing, this is an extremely contentious, complicated, controversial subject. But I've talked with several people and I will let them do the talking now on paraphrase them thes air Dennis, who have been in the field for decades. And one of whom, Michael Gelb, Dr Michael Gelb. You can look it up, look him up and seize on the board of every imaginable different association related to dentistry, He told me, He said, half of people half of orthodontic treatment braces, traditional braces treatments are gonna make breathing worse, Um, for for the people who received them. Andi, he said, In 10 years from now, we're gonna look back and be horrified at what we've done. So what he explained to me is, So the problem we have with crooked teeth right is our mouth isn't big enough, so teeth growing crooked. So what happens when you remove more teeth and then get headgear to push those teeth back and then get braces to push those? What's gonna happen to the Airway? And again, this is from from Gelb and and some some of its from you and some of its from Paul Ehrlich, who is a professor at Stanford who wrote a book called Jaws, which is about this exact specific subject. So if you really wanna learn more about this specific subject, you Stanford guy, released by Stanford University Press pretty legit. So that's that's what they're saying. And the principle of it makes a lot of sense to me. And they found that you know, kids, if you look at jaw size, correlated with their way, they found that kids who are breast fed versus those who were bottle fed will have significantly lesser chance of getting sleep happening and snoring later on. Because breastfeeding you have to use your mouth, you have to stretch it. You have to you're gonna be pushing that mouth out. You're gonna be creating a wider mouth and a larger airway. And I believe they've done studies. Karen Boutique at Albert Einstein Medical Centers, then studies looking at how how straight kids teeth are compared to those who were bottle fed because it's all about having that wider pallet, that wider mouth. Wow. So it's a lot to process their I really realized maybe a little too much. No, no, this is like, this is why we're here. This is why they're long form exists. And, um, I'm thinking right now about what I desire for a solution. And I do want to go talk to my dentist about this, have you and you mentioned, it's it's controversial and I got a dentist who's pretty pretty on spot. He's for thinking guy, and I'm wondering what kind of conversation what I have with him, and I'm guessing you had to have a bunch of conversations to the course of the research of the book. Did you find resistance like what other people at home going to expect if they wanna have this conversation with their mouth? Health care professional? I talked to more than a dentist. Dozen. Dennis. Um, these are people who are teaching at Columbia. These air people are teaching at the top institutions, and what they've said is there's they've been in denial for a long time, but that's really starting to change in a huge way because what they're starting to do, People want straight teeth, right? You wanna look goods easier to chew. I get that, but they're starting to do, which I think is so fascinating. Hence, hence the subtitle. New Signs of a Law start. The first orthodontics treatments expanded the mouth. They didn't crane it down, so these were the very first ones they were for Children who couldn't breathe, who had cleft palates and at other issues in which they couldn't choose and breathes. So they expanded their mouth. And that's how teeth were straightened, ah, 100 years ago by expanding the mouth, making the mouth wider so teeth with naturally growing straight. So there is a huge I would call it a revolution in using these expanding devices. Now, to the point where my feeling is these they're going to take over a lot of orthodontist. Um, and the orthodontist I've been talking to, um, have have been using these things for decades, and now they're just seeing the demand surge because they've found, especially with kids. If you use one of these devices toe help, their teeth naturally growing straight there, breathing will improve, their airway will get larger. So why wouldn't you want to straighten teeth and expand your airway and make your breathing easier at the same time? That the reason is doing these procedures is more in depth, It's harder. And what I've been told from them is the reason braces got so popular it was production line dentistry. You do the same thing for the same same people down the line, and this expansion takes more time and more skill. Yeah, we are impatient. Um, so just a quick shoutout Thio, Mikey t on instagram live saying this is huge for me. Thank you so much. Until now, block theory on Facebook is, uh, agreeing with you this breathing slowly through the nose, um, is a game changer for both personal health and a bunch of people that he shared a works with, um And how fast can you see? Changes happen if you focus either through a meditative practice or through a coach or therapist? If you If you do start breathing through your nose What? You know, how fast can we expect to see changes in personal health? If someone out there has a blood pressure monitor, I want them to try this. Try this at home. Put on your cup, take your measurement, and then I want you to breathe at a pace of about 5 to 6 seconds in to 6 seconds out. Do you know slowly? Don't don't push it. Don't get paranoid that you're half a second off. Forget that. Breathe slowly through your nose. Relax yourself and then check your blood pressure A couple of minutes After that, there's a good chance, especially those with who have moderate to very high blood pressure. Your blood pressure could drop 10 or 15 points, So that's what happens to the body in a few minutes. Just imagine what would happen in a few days or a few weeks or a few months. Eso these thes transformations and I'm going to use that word, even though it's a little touchy feely and I've talked to clinicians who have worked with people with anxiety, depression, breathing problems, asthma. These transformations are so profound on their measured, we have the data to support this. There's tons of studies on this, um, eso, I think just by breathing for five minutes, just try it for five minutes a day and see how you feel. If you have a pulse oximeter, you put that on a swell those air. Another is a huge like black market for for Pulse. Ox is now with Kobe, but a lot of people will think well, there's no way I'm getting enough oxygen into my body when I'm breathing that slowly. Chances are you're oxygen's either going to stay the same or it's gonna go up by breathing that slowly because the idea that you have to breathe like that to get maximum oxygen in is complete garbage. You're just breathing air back out. You're causing a lot more stress to your heart. That's why these slow, easy breaths are the way to go. So to answer your specific question depends on the person. Depends how heavy you go into this stuff. I've had people who tried a little piece of tape on their lips. They've been snoring for for 20 years, 30 years. They've had problems associated with that blood pressure stuff, and within two nights they no longer store and their blood pressure has gone down. And they wrote me, you know, crying in these emails. And again, I'm not a therapist. I'm not a doctor. But this stuff is stuff that's available to anyone. It's totally free. And the worst thing that can happen if you do this is you might feel better, right? That's about the worst side effects. So it seems pretty good to me. No, I actually I appreciate your ability to point to science rather than be the scientists, because there's, you know, that takes a little bit of the pressure off and There's all kinds of drama that goes around and making big claims that refute, you know, thought thinking that is, hundreds of thousands of years old. Um, one question came in which you know, Dylan James, you must have missed this. Do braces affect your names of breathing? Yeah, because they're constraining the size of your mouth and your mouth constraining constraining size. Your mouth will reduce the size of the airway, etcetera. So, yes. Um, but a bunch of folks are a couple now, actually. Are asking, um, Carly in particular. What about if you have low pressure, low blood pressure? Is this gonna be bad for you? I would imagine it would not be because what it is doing is it is balancing the different systems in your body toe work most efficiently. So you're only allowing things toe work better. I do not want to be giving anyone any prescriptions with with chronically low blood pressure. Um, and Anders a supposed to me, my blood pressure is pretty high. Which is why I saw this huge change. He had very low blood pressure. He was about 11 18. His his, uh, diastolic. Yeah, that's the high one. And he showed on Li slight changes in his blood pressure when he switched from different breathing patterns. So So it's just able to balance the body in in certain ways. Mhm. Um, I wanted todo to interrupt you. There is a little delay on your Skype. Um so? Well, I'm half has been a guest on this show. I'm a huge, personally huge cold water therapy person. One of the things that I noticed about my cold water therapy is that the first thing I worked on was breathing slowly in cold water. Um, but you do, um, you sort of do Ah ah de briefer tear down of VIMs breathing method. And I'm wondering if you could share that with us and and what you concluded as a journalist from what you reported on what he had to say. So his his breathing method and I just read an early release of his new book and he says this is not my breathing method. This thing has been around for thousands of years, you know? And I talked about the history in the books. So this has been practiced. Bye bye. Probably millions of monks and other people over over at least 1000 years. And prana Hamas, which are very similar to this practice, have been practiced even longer than that. So what they found is a lot of people think that stressing your body out is a bad thing because we're already so stressed. Right? So what? What whims method of to mo or the other to most other pronto Hamas do is they purposely stress you out. So a lot of people are like, How can that be good for me? Um, what it does is it snaps you out of your funk. So so many of us go through our days in this mild level of stress, mild to moderate that we never really relax. We never have to, like, run or fight for our lives. So just this chronic chronic stress and that it's so damaging. So what? What these? What wind does and and the benefits? Where I see so much of this comes in is it reminds your body what real stress feels like, but it compounds that in a very small amount of time. So for 15 minutes, you're really going for it so specifically so that the 23 a half hours of the day that are left. You were relaxed and balanced and functioning the way you should function. And I think that the cold shower, which I'm a big fan of, is well, especially for vascular health. And if anyone hasn't done this, if you want to lower your heart rate, lower your blood pressure, finish off your showers with with about a minute of cold water and you can extend that further. But but that's what you need thio begin with. So I really feel these things working hand in hand. This or medic stress, which is exposing the body to short bursts of stress, is is known to be profoundly healing to people, especially with autoimmune diseases, where their immune systems are just running wild. This teaches them and focus that focuses them and ramps those systems back down. So at UCSF here, University of California, San Francisco, there now studying whim system with with arthritis, another autoimmune issues. But we already know that it works for those conditions for autoimmune conditions. Andi, it's to me. It's fascinating. This this stuff has been around for so long and again. Western science is just like, Oh, yeah, maybe, You know, maybe it can really help us. Maybe we don't need to put someone on 12 different prescription drugs for 12 different things and fix the core problem. And that's really what wins all about. Yeah, I love that about him. And you mentioned just this low grade stress, and there's the questions you're moving so quickly for me. I missed one about anxiety, but you you tied it in, Um, you talk in the book about, um, just the nervous system in general, the autonomic nervous system and can you expand? I suppose this is touching a little bit on the comment that you just had about whims. Uh, not not Whims method the thousands of year old breathing method. Um, just I'm wondering, overall for people, um, who suffer from anxiety and even so many of us who are dealing with chronic stress, and we've become accustomed to it. Um, you know, talk to us about what you found in your researching the science. So if people are at home, you can place your hand over your heart and taken inhale. Doesn't matter. Mouth, nose to This doesn't matter. You're gonna feel your heart rate speed up, then exhale. Keep back. Selling longer, Longer, longer. You're gonna feel your heart rate slow down so we get a sympathetic response. Every time we inhale, we get a Paris sympathetic. This is the rest. And relax response every time we exhale so you can use these levers. If you want to get really amped up, you can. You can inhale longer than you exhale. If you want to slow down, you can inhale the account about four and exhale a inhale before exhale 10. Inhale for exhaled. So the longer you're exhaling, the more you're gonna be eliciting that parasympathetic response. Most of us want a balance in these things, which is why that five or six seconds in 5 to 6 seconds out it's so good. But we can use breathing as this lever. Thio actually take control of our autonomic nervous system, which until a few years ago was supposed to be absolutely impossible. It's called autonomic because that means automatic that means beyond our control. But that is not true. We can take control of our nervous system and many aspects of immune function through our breathing. So another thing I want to mention about anxiety is traditionally people with anxiety and asthma breathe too much, which is why they have very low resting carbon dioxide levels. They're constantly they found that for certain people. I'm not going to say this is gonna work for everyone but for certain people, by lengthening those inhales and lengthening those exhales especially and building your tolerance for carbon dioxide, which is what triggers the need to breathe. The need to breathe is not triggered by oxygen. It is CO two. So if you can increase slowly, gently increase your tolerance for co two. You're gonna naturally except this habit of breathing slowly. And we know that slower focus breathing can help abate both asthma and anxiety attacks for a lot of people. So that's another thing. Totally free experiment with it. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, I'm a previous episode of the show here on actually on creative live TV. Um, I sat with Dr Kelly's threat and I don't know if you know Dr Kelly's work, but he got me to hold my breath for, I think, two minutes and 45 seconds on my first sort of. He just had me do a couple breathing exercises and then just, like, live on the air. And I wasn't even ready to breathe. I was like, I could go. I could keep going. And I know this was a secret in free diving. Um, you talked about training breath, and you in your previous book. Um, I just wanna just for those of you who are hung up on that wait a minute. I thought, you know, lack of oxygen. No, it's actually a CO to trigger. Um, all this stuff is again. It's in the book. And if you're just joining us, I'm sitting down with James Nestor talking about the importance of breath. And no, it's not lost on anyone in this conversation. The importance of breath. Not just because here we are all sharing breathing. Um, the timing of again. George Floyd being killed without having access to breath. Um, the pandemic. As James said, our lungs are inside out, and we've seen it. You know, it's just incredible to me how much of our world is centered around something that we take for granted and that we it's it's if you're doing it, then it's working. And what James has shown in this book, which is again It's It's a scientific thriller. It's a page Turner Is that our beliefs about breath and breathing unless you've been studying it for some time, are largely messed up. I want to give a shout out Thio Couple folks on Instagram live. I want to get your question here in just a second. Um, Grady wants to know Gray Dio wants to know. Um what what's the best way to start introducing this to someone who is a Doubter? Someone who does not who believes these sort of lies Or maybe even they're not intentional, just the lack of investigation into our ability to breathe better. What do you recommend, or do you have a recommendation? First of all, I would suggest that said doubt or check out the actual science from leaders in the field who have been doing this stuff for decades and decades. A za journalist. I'm not the one conducting these this research, even though I did, and a few of these studies that could help it. Um, but I was working with people who this is their job to study this stuff. Um, and if anyone says, Oh, you breathe slowly It's just a placebo effect. How does that explain your blood pressure change? How does that explain the shift in in your heartbeat, right. How does it explain the increase of co two, which is gonna allow all that tingling to disappear from your fingers? Because now there's circulation to your brain and your extremities. So you know, science is measurable truth, so anything that can be measured can be studied. And if it could be studied, it can be proven right or wrong. So I'm a big fan of measurements. If something can't be measured, then you know, I I think there's reason to be doubtful. But there are so many people who have been measuring this and doing incredible or in this tons of other academic books on this, too, when they're about pages long and they're right up here. And if you want him, I'll send you. Yeah, it's just going to be expensive. So, Thio, answer the question. You know, I would say if if this person is a snore, uh, put a little piece of hypoallergenic tape, not duct tape. Be smart just to just to train the jaw shut at night and you can download a free app called called Snore Lab. There's a bunch of other APS and and record your baseline before and after and see how it affects your your snoring. It takes a while to get used to this tape thing, but give it a couple of days. We've got some. A lot of people have some free time nowadays. Why not experiment to improve, improve your health or get a blood pressure cuff monitor and and see how different breathing is gonna affect your blood pressure? Um, you know that the Wim Hof thing Also, I wanted to mention this, especially in regards to nervous system function. The whole point of what he's trying to do is to make you flexible, because a body that's flexible is gonna be much more fit, much more able to overcome. Adversity is when we become inflexible where oh, I can only hold my breath for 10 seconds. I'm not gonna hold my breath anymore. I hate breathing too fast. That makes me nervous. I hate holding my breath. That makes the idea is just like a great athlete is gonna be flexible in all these different ways are breathing should be flexible is well, And that's why these practices for asthmatics and people with anxiety you're so helpful because it makes them their bodies able to accept a higher threshold of CO two in different gasses in their body without freaking out. And I really think that that's the key. Mhm spoken so much truth. Um, I'm gonna just, uh, answer a couple questions here. Um, I'm a studio earlier in the broadcast of To Toil asks about, um, they have restricted nasal passages. You said these exercises can help? Absolutely. And and, um, someone else here is talking about chronic Sinus issues. Absolutely. Um, someone else has to, uh yeah. Another chronic Sinus issue here. Inflammation in the Sinuses. Um, a lot. So the answer is yes. Yes, but you could do a couple of tests right now. I know you're in the actionable items so before and again, not a therapist, People. I'm just teaching you some things I've learned. Go like this. Take your nose, take your fingers, spread your nostrils out. If you could breathe a lot easier, not don't. Don't grab. Um, you on the side. Okay. If you can breathe easier. This is called the coddles maneuver. If you could breathe easier that way, then there is a chance your nostrils are either too flexible or aren't wide enough. And you can get these things called Breathe Right strips, which lift the nostrils up and make breathing easier. These air good for snoring at night. You see football players wearing these things so surgical interventions can help with that. For chronic sinusitis, I read the weirdest study of Come Across where that stuff that nitric oxide it interacts with with fungus is and viruses and bacterial. So if you hum, you are increasing your nitric oxide fold over, just breathing through your nose. So this one guy was humming for about 10 minutes three or four times a day. And he said, this is a one off N one experiment that he was able to get rid of his his chronic sinusitis. That way, we do know if you, if anyone has a stuffy nose right now, another trick. So exhale. It's calmly pinch your nose shut. Nod your head up and down side to side. Hold your breath as long as you can. When you feel the need to breathe, open the nostrils and very slowly take a breath through your nose. If you can't quite breathe well yet. Repeat this about four or five times. So for congestion, this trick works really well. Builds co two. The knows that opens up the capillaries. Intends to really help. So again, some people do need surgical interventions. But as Nyack told me, the guy at Stanford, if your sink is clogged, you're gonna find a way of unclogging it as soon as possible. The nose needs to be considered in the same regard, breathing through the nose. It is a must. Clearing the nose is a must. Um, Seems like our connection degraded a little bit. There's so many folks, um, asking questions and we're at a time. But this is the cliffhanger, right? All of the answers and the inspiration to do this work is in James new book Breath, which, if you're listening to this, you're missing it because I'm holding up the hardback right now. Um, breath a new science of a lost art. James, thank you so much for being on this show. You sewn together so many different. You know, guests and P O. V s. Whether you're Laird Hamilton, surfer. Need to hold your breath under waves or vim Hoff or meditation. Mindfulness. You've connected the ideas behind so many guests that we've had on this show. Um, and again Zurita and Karen and Dylan and Carly and Chad and Stefan and people from all over the world grateful for the work that you're doing. Congratulations on hitting the New York Times list. Um, what's the best? You know, you did. You mentioned that you are hosting conversations with doctors on other leaders in the breathing community. Um, breathing community sounds kind of funny, but, uh, the community for whom breath is critical. Um, what's the best place for people to find you? So my website, Mr James nestor dot com You can put a backslash breath in their delivers you to the site dedicated to the book. I put all of the scientific references available free online. There's 500 or so. If you don't believe some of these claims about emphysema mix or breathing helping thio cure scoliosis, there's videos there as well. Um, and just last week, I've received So maney reader questions hundreds of these things that I don't feel comfortable answering. So I'm from the next couple months, I'm bringing the top of the top leaders in the field to come on and answer these questions for you. These people aren't being paid. They're not selling anything. They're here. Toe, toe help. And that should be distributed. I'm on. I tryto trying to be better at the social media thing. So my instagram and Facebook is the same name, Mr James Nestor. And I'll be putting all of that stuff on on that as well. And, uh, for those of you spelling challenged out there Mr M R J mes James N E S t o r Mr. James Nestor, Um, I'm on on your instagram channel. They're following you. And I've already seen a couple of the conversations you've posted there, and I'm looking forward to them. I I will be joining Wanna say thanks again. So much for being on this show for investing so much time and energy and unlocking um What? You know, by our standards, so many of the things that we're doing right now we're gonna be looked back upon as like head shakers. Thanks for bringing this to our attention and really grateful for your time. Thank you very much for having me. Really appreciate it. All right, everybody signing off for another episode of the changeovers live show here on CREATIVELIVE. Um, looking at the comments. Very, very happy to be in your ears and do James. Ah, solid. Go pick up a copy of his book and you will not be disappointed. So you again, Hopefully tomorrow. Um