Speaker 1: By breathing in this slow way, we can reconnect those
Speaker 1: emotional centers the hippo campus and magdala with that frontal
Speaker 1: cortex and allow ourselves to make more reasoned decisions instead
Speaker 1: of these rash, I rate, angry emotional outbursts. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized
Speaker 1: the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true,
Speaker 1: and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is James Nestor, and author
Speaker 1: and journalist who has written for Outside Magazine, The Atlantic,
Speaker 1: National Public Radio, The New York Times, and many many more. Today,
Speaker 1: James and Eric discuss his New York Times best selling book, Breath,
Speaker 1: the New Science of a Lost Art. Hi James, Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure
Speaker 1: to have you on. Your new book is called Breath,
Speaker 1: the New Science of a Lost Art, and uh, I
Speaker 1: was really excited to read it. I've been looking forward
Speaker 1: to it for quite some time, as I was telling
Speaker 1: you before the show, and it it really lives up
Speaker 1: to the height. It's a wonderful book, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: get into it, but we're gonna start like we always do,
Speaker 1: with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandfather
Speaker 1: who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there
Speaker 1: are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 1: One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you. In your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do well, I would have to
Speaker 1: associate it directly with breathing, and I would view that
Speaker 1: a bad wolf as mouth breathing, and I would view
Speaker 1: that good wolf as nasal breathing. And depending on which
Speaker 1: of those pathways you breathe is really going to dictate
Speaker 1: so much of your health and how you're able to
Speaker 1: think about things, and your mood and so much more.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great intro. And mouth breathing is
Speaker 1: a big topic in the book, and we're going to
Speaker 1: get to that in a second. Before we go all
Speaker 1: away there, though, I want to talk just a little
Speaker 1: bit about a statement that you made a couple of
Speaker 1: different times in the book, and I think it's an
Speaker 1: important one. You basically say that the missing pillar in
Speaker 1: health is breath. Say a little more about that. Well.
Speaker 1: I think most of us have gotten the message on
Speaker 1: what to eat right, at least most of us compared
Speaker 1: to how we were fifty years ago. We're aware that
Speaker 1: eating whole foods, that staying away from highly processed carbs,
Speaker 1: you know, that's the way to eat properly. We're also
Speaker 1: aware of that we need to move around, we need
Speaker 1: to exercise, we constantly need to be in motion otherwise
Speaker 1: some bad things can happen to our bodies. And that
Speaker 1: message has been pretty clear. But neither of those things
Speaker 1: really matter that much unless you're breathing properly. Because you
Speaker 1: can go how long two weeks without food, You can
Speaker 1: go a lifetime without exercising, but you can only go
Speaker 1: a couple of minutes without reading. And how we get
Speaker 1: that breath, how we process it, it really determines so
Speaker 1: much of what we're able to do, where our potential is,
Speaker 1: and where our downfalls are as well. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting because I agree with you. I think that
Speaker 1: when I look at the fundamentals of health, both physical, mental,
Speaker 1: and emotional, I look at very foundational things like you
Speaker 1: mentioned movement or exercise, eating, well, I think sleep. It's
Speaker 1: become incredibly apparent how important sleep is for me. Some
Speaker 1: sort of contemplative practice is a big part of that.
Speaker 1: But I think that a lot of us when we
Speaker 1: think of breathing, if we think of it at all,
Speaker 1: we think of it as something that maybe we call
Speaker 1: on occasionally or in times of trouble. Oh, if I'm stressed,
Speaker 1: I need to take some deep breaths. But we don't
Speaker 1: think of it as as you said, I like that
Speaker 1: word as as one of those fundamental pillars too our
Speaker 1: overall well being. And I think the book really points
Speaker 1: out in a lot of detail how really important the
Speaker 1: way we breathe is, and it really influences the quality
Speaker 1: of our lives, and it really influences a lot of
Speaker 1: different health conditions. Well, it's great that breathing is an
Speaker 1: unconscious act that we don't have to think about it.
Speaker 1: What a pain in the butt that would be to
Speaker 1: have to think about it twenty times a day, right,
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean how we breathe is not affecting
Speaker 1: us in different ways. And the manner in which we
Speaker 1: breathe affects every single system of our body right down
Speaker 1: to every single cell, you know. And a lot of
Speaker 1: us can get by with this dysfunctional breathing, with breathing
Speaker 1: through the mouth, breathing too much, breathing too little, hunched over,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean we're healthy, just like we can
Speaker 1: get by eating you know, twenty ding dong's a day
Speaker 1: and have enough calories, but that doesn't mean we're going
Speaker 1: to be healthy. And and it's just this missing piece
Speaker 1: of this puzzle that I've found, so people are paying
Speaker 1: attention to even though there's a huge foundation of science
Speaker 1: showing that how we breathe has such an incredible effect
Speaker 1: on our physical body or mental body, even how we
Speaker 1: grow on our bones. Twenty ding Dong's a Day is
Speaker 1: about the equivalent of your Stanford experiment that you did.
Speaker 1: That would be the food version of that, which would
Speaker 1: be to you know, exist on twenty ding Dong's a
Speaker 1: Day only for a month. But let's lead into that
Speaker 1: because one of the things that you started with when
Speaker 1: we talked about the Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf
Speaker 1: was mouth breathing and how bad it is for us.
Speaker 1: So why don't you first just briefly tell us about
Speaker 1: the experiment you did, and then briefly tell us about
Speaker 1: why mouth breathing is so bad and what it does
Speaker 1: to us, which you demonstrate very well in what you
Speaker 1: did to yourself. So I'm in San Francisco and I'm
Speaker 1: pretty close to Stanford, and I use their medical library
Speaker 1: and their library all the time, their resources. I'm just
Speaker 1: poaching things from Stanford constantly, and I got to be
Speaker 1: pretty good friends with the chief of rhinology research down there.
Speaker 1: His name is Dr Jayack or Nayak big nose guy,
Speaker 1: and uh, he was so depressed that so many of
Speaker 1: us are breathing through our mouth, something like of us
Speaker 1: are habitual mouth breathers, and when we go to sleep,
Speaker 1: that increases to about sixty close to seventy of us
Speaker 1: breathe through our mouths. And he explained to me that
Speaker 1: the nose serves innumerable functions in our body, helps to
Speaker 1: filter air and heats it, it moistens it, it conditions
Speaker 1: at all. That we get more oxygen breathing through the
Speaker 1: nose than we do through the mouth. All of this
Speaker 1: isn't known. We've known this for a long time. But
Speaker 1: that damage of mouth breathing, exposing your lungs to everything,
Speaker 1: and the environments and everything else that comes with it,
Speaker 1: the poor posture as well. No one knew how quickly
Speaker 1: that came on. Did it come on after decades or years?
Speaker 1: One was sure. So after several meetings, several interviews, I said, well,
Speaker 1: why don't you do a test with this. You're you're
Speaker 1: at Stanford, you have all these resources, and uh, he
Speaker 1: loved the idea, but he said that asking subjects to
Speaker 1: participate in test like this in his opinion would be
Speaker 1: unethical considering the potential damage it would do to them,
Speaker 1: even though the population is breathing this way. So it's
Speaker 1: a long way of saying I volunteered. I said, well,
Speaker 1: what if I willingly put myself in here as a subject,
Speaker 1: and what if I get someone else? So it's an
Speaker 1: end to experiment and he said, okay, if you can
Speaker 1: do that, and I did, And the experiment was set
Speaker 1: up in two phases. For ten days, we're just breathing
Speaker 1: through our mouths, which a lot of people think is
Speaker 1: some like jackass stunt. That was not the intention. We
Speaker 1: were just lulling ourselves new position that so much of
Speaker 1: the population already knows. For the other ten days, would
Speaker 1: be breathing through our noses as often as we possibly could,
Speaker 1: and we would be taking collecting data the whole way
Speaker 1: through and comparing those data sets at the end of
Speaker 1: that experiment. And what happened, Well, we knew the mouth
Speaker 1: breathing part was not going to be a picnic. I
Speaker 1: was pretty aware of that. But you know, an hour
Speaker 1: after we were leaving Stanford coming back, we're kind of
Speaker 1: laughing about it, like, yeah, this is gonna be terrible,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know. Then I checked my blood pressure
Speaker 1: and was as high as I've ever seen it in
Speaker 1: my life. And over breathing causing your body to stress
Speaker 1: out by the constant flow of air very bad for
Speaker 1: your body, and it can jack your blood pressure. And
Speaker 1: that's exactly what happened to me. Then I went to
Speaker 1: sleep that night and I snored for the first time
Speaker 1: that I've ever been aware of. When we recorded about
Speaker 1: two weeks of baseline before this zero snoring or a
Speaker 1: couple of minutes a night, max and I snored for
Speaker 1: an hour and a half and the other subject, andrews Olsen,
Speaker 1: who came from Sweden to be a part of this experiment,
Speaker 1: was snoring even more than that. And the longer the
Speaker 1: experiment went on, the worst we were snoring, we got
Speaker 1: sleep apnea, we were fatigued, athletic performance really sank. I mean,
Speaker 1: you name it. There's a whole laundry list of problems,
Speaker 1: and it felt just awful beyond that. So basically, what
Speaker 1: you guys did was insert things in your nose so
Speaker 1: that you couldn't breathe through your nose, so you could
Speaker 1: only breathe through your mouth. And as you mentioned, all
Speaker 1: sorts of things that you could measure all got a
Speaker 1: lot worse, and as you said, you felt miserable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's exactly what we did. We had silicon up
Speaker 1: our noses. And a lot of people think, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I'm just getting so paranoid just thinking of that. But
Speaker 1: if you consider that of the population suffers from chronic sinusidis,
Speaker 1: you know, about fifty has inflamed terminates an allergy season,
Speaker 1: how many people are breathing through their noses? You know,
Speaker 1: it's we become a population of mouth breathers. So again,
Speaker 1: this sounds like some heinous thing that we did, but
Speaker 1: it really wasn't when you consider how so many people
Speaker 1: are breathing right now. And so you can answer this
Speaker 1: one in two ways. Why is mouth breathing so bad
Speaker 1: for us? Or what are some of the impacts of
Speaker 1: breathing through our mouth more often than we should? Sure?
Speaker 1: So the first one is if you grow up as
Speaker 1: a mouth delicature of your face, because if you constantly
Speaker 1: hold your face in that position, your face will tend
Speaker 1: to be longer, your face will be more recessed, your
Speaker 1: chin will be more recessed. And this is so common
Speaker 1: that researchers have a name for it. They call it
Speaker 1: annoid face for when kids have inflamed annoids or even
Speaker 1: tonsils and they have to open their mouths to breathe.
Speaker 1: So if you do that over a series of years,
Speaker 1: it will affect how you look, and according to a
Speaker 1: lot of people, you will you will look much less
Speaker 1: attractive than you would otherwise. It will also affect how
Speaker 1: your teeth will grow in so habitual mouth breathing can
Speaker 1: also affect your mouth size and how how you develop.
Speaker 1: So later on in life, when we're adults, if we're
Speaker 1: mouth breathing, you can just consider every time you take
Speaker 1: a breath through your mouth, you might as well have
Speaker 1: your lungs as an external organ, because they're exposed to
Speaker 1: all the dust, all the mold, all the pollution, all
Speaker 1: the allergens, anything else in the air there directly exposed
Speaker 1: to it. And if you live in a city like me,
Speaker 1: that means a whole bunch of crap every day. So
Speaker 1: our noses are our first line of defense for our
Speaker 1: body for pathogens, for viruses, for bacteria, for pollution, all
Speaker 1: of that, that's what the nose does. So it's just
Speaker 1: something to consider when you're going out and walking around.
Speaker 1: You see all these people breathing through their mouths. They're
Speaker 1: just exposing themselves to everything around them. And so, what
Speaker 1: are some ways that we can cut down on mouth breathing,
Speaker 1: particularly given that it sounds like more of us do
Speaker 1: it while we sleep. Yeah, this is a tricky thing.
Speaker 1: It's one thing in the daytime because you're you're conscious,
Speaker 1: and you can develop this habit of closing your mouth.
Speaker 1: So some people have very serious problems and their noses
Speaker 1: and their sinuses, and they need surgical interventions. Okay, so
Speaker 1: so for sure, but the majority of us don't. We
Speaker 1: just need better habits and we need to train ourselves
Speaker 1: to work this organ out to let it do what
Speaker 1: it's naturally designed to do. So in the daytime, for
Speaker 1: the second phase of the experiment, we wore a little
Speaker 1: piece of tape in our mouths in the day to
Speaker 1: teach ourselves remind ourselves to just be breathing through our noses.
Speaker 1: And at night we use that same little piece of tape. Now,
Speaker 1: this is not a hostage or pulp fiction kind of
Speaker 1: vibe going on here. It's a teeny piece of tape
Speaker 1: with a very light adhesive that comes immediately off if
Speaker 1: you just open your mouth. It's just a reminder to
Speaker 1: keep your mouth shut. And just by wearing that piece
Speaker 1: of tape, my story went from four hours at its
Speaker 1: highest mouth breathing to zero, and my sleep apnea went
Speaker 1: to zero. Anders went from six hours of storing to
Speaker 1: night to zero zero sleep apnea. A h I so, um,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not saying what worked for us is
Speaker 1: going to work for everyone. But I have heard from
Speaker 1: literally hundreds of people who are so piste off that
Speaker 1: they weren't told this thirty years ago. It's worked amazingly
Speaker 1: well for them. And the best part is it's free
Speaker 1: and it's available to anyone. Well, I, after reading the book,
Speaker 1: am going to attempt this tape be in my mouth
Speaker 1: shut at night trick to see what happens. Yeah, let
Speaker 1: me know how it goes. I just want to be
Speaker 1: totally clear here to everyone. I'm not offering a blanket
Speaker 1: prescription to all your woes. I'm not qualified to do that.
Speaker 1: I'm a journalist and some people just have major nasal
Speaker 1: obstruction issues that will need surgery. But but as I
Speaker 1: had said before, a lot of us don't. And I
Speaker 1: had heard this from Dr Anne Kearney at Stanford, who
Speaker 1: was slated for surgery. She's a breathing therapist at Stanford
Speaker 1: and she just worked out her nose. She just, over
Speaker 1: a series of weeks, taught herself to breathe through her
Speaker 1: nose and it completely opened up. And I had the
Speaker 1: same experience. So what you're saying is, even if we
Speaker 1: feel some degree of congestion, if we try and really
Speaker 1: practice breathing through our nose more, we might restore functionality
Speaker 1: for many people. That's right. This is a use it
Speaker 1: or lose it. Oregan so much so that I was
Speaker 1: just talking to Anne Kearney and she had looked at
Speaker 1: people who had laryngectomes, a little hole drilled in their throats,
Speaker 1: and she found that between two months and two years
Speaker 1: their noses where one obstructed, they completely close it off
Speaker 1: because they weren't being used. Those science passages aren't just
Speaker 1: bone right, They're covered in erectile tissue which can become
Speaker 1: flaccid or erect just like the tissue you know where,
Speaker 1: so it opens and closes all the time. So it
Speaker 1: can be conditioned to be more open and allow more
Speaker 1: air in there so that you can become a nasal breather. Excellent,
Speaker 1: So let's move on to some of the other key
Speaker 1: points in the book. One of the most important parts
Speaker 1: of breathing is not what a lot of us focus on,
Speaker 1: which is the inhale, but actually on the exhale. Why
Speaker 1: is the exhale important to focus on? Why is it
Speaker 1: arguably more important than the inhale, or at least equally important.
Speaker 1: So a lot of us, especially when we get stressed,
Speaker 1: will breathe in, we'll breathe the on top of that,
Speaker 1: we'll breathe in on top of that, we'll breathe the
Speaker 1: in on top of that, and we just keep packing
Speaker 1: air in. So there are diaphragms aren't really moving, they're
Speaker 1: just staying in this very low position. It's so much
Speaker 1: more efficient to get that stale air out before we
Speaker 1: take a big breath in. For the same reason is
Speaker 1: if you're driving a cross country and you filled up
Speaker 1: your gas tank every time, it went down to about
Speaker 1: three quarters of a tank, and then you filled it
Speaker 1: up again, and you filled it up again, that would
Speaker 1: take a lot of time, a lot of wear and tear.
Speaker 1: You can think of your breathing in your lungs in
Speaker 1: the same way. You want to breathe as few breaths
Speaker 1: as you can that still sustains your metabolic needs. And
Speaker 1: so for a lot of us, we tend to breathe
Speaker 1: way too much, breathing air on top of air. But
Speaker 1: by taking these fluid breaths easy breath in and then
Speaker 1: a full breath out, we can take fewer breaths and
Speaker 1: get more oxygen. And another cool thing about this is
Speaker 1: that diaphragm that sits below the lungs. Because the lungs
Speaker 1: don't do anything, they don't do anything on their own,
Speaker 1: they need this diet pramp to expand them and contract them.
Speaker 1: That diaphragm moves up and down like a piston in
Speaker 1: our body and helps with circulation and move limp fluid
Speaker 1: as well. So it serves many functions taking these fluid deeper,
Speaker 1: slower breaths. And so you describe in the book what
Speaker 1: you call the perfect breath shown in a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways to be the right I don't want use
Speaker 1: the word the right way to breathe, an optimal way
Speaker 1: to breathe, And lots of our spiritual traditions also show
Speaker 1: the same thing. Say a little bit more about the
Speaker 1: perfect breath and how you do it, and and some
Speaker 1: of the different places it shows up. I discovered this
Speaker 1: study that was put out about twenty years ago by
Speaker 1: some Italian researchers where they gathered a group of subjects
Speaker 1: and they had them recite the Abbe Maria in Latin,
Speaker 1: and then they had them recite Oh money, Pot Me Home,
Speaker 1: which is a famous Buddhist mantra, and they noticed that
Speaker 1: it took these subjects the same amount of time to
Speaker 1: recite each of these phrases, which works out to about
Speaker 1: five to six breasts per minute. That's about five to
Speaker 1: six seconds in and five to six seconds out. Now,
Speaker 1: this respiration rate also occurred in Sata Nam, which is
Speaker 1: the famous Kunalini chant, and so many other prayers. And
Speaker 1: it turns out when we recite these prayers, when we
Speaker 1: breathe this way, we deliver more oxygen to the brain,
Speaker 1: We lower our blood pressure, we calm ourselves down, We
Speaker 1: let the systems in our body work at a state
Speaker 1: of peak efficiency, which they called coherence, which is why
Speaker 1: this is called coherent breathing. So all it is, you
Speaker 1: don't have to pray to get these benefits. We pray.
Speaker 1: Go ahead and pray. That's cool if you want to
Speaker 1: do that. But all you really need to do is
Speaker 1: take a gentle breath into count of about five or
Speaker 1: six and a gentle breath out to that same amount
Speaker 1: of time, and you get these benefits from just by
Speaker 1: breathing that way. Would you say that's the optimal way
Speaker 1: to breathe most of the time. I think it certainly
Speaker 1: wouldn't hurt. There's no such thing as having too much
Speaker 1: peak efficiency. Is it possible? Probably not. You know, this
Speaker 1: is a reminder throughout the day to slow down your
Speaker 1: breathing because the more you breathe this way, the more
Speaker 1: you acclimate your body to feel safe and comfortable breathing
Speaker 1: at this slow, soft, and deeper rate. And that's what
Speaker 1: you want to do. I mean, if you're like me,
Speaker 1: I don't want to walk around with an Apple watch
Speaker 1: be being all the time reminding me to breathe or
Speaker 1: note pad or whatever. I want this stuff to become
Speaker 1: an unconscious habit. But that can take a long time
Speaker 1: to establish those habits. So this is a great one
Speaker 1: to use before a phone call, if you're nervous, if
Speaker 1: you want to slow down, if you really want to
Speaker 1: focus on something. Because at Northwestern University a few years ago,
Speaker 1: they found that this This breathing pattern when it was
Speaker 1: taken in and out of the nose, also increases the
Speaker 1: connections between different areas of the brain to allow us
Speaker 1: to remember and to think more clearly about things. So
Speaker 1: it really affects so many systems in the body. Yeah,
Speaker 1: brain can activities a big deal, connecting to different aspects
Speaker 1: of the brain, of course, And if you look at
Speaker 1: what's happened to so many of us right now, we're
Speaker 1: losing contexts and losing connection with our prefrontal cortex, the
Speaker 1: area that is in control of logic and decision making,
Speaker 1: and we're letting emotions control what we're thinking, right, And
Speaker 1: so by breathing in this slow way, we can reconnect
Speaker 1: those emotional centers the Hipple camp as a magdala, with
Speaker 1: that frontal cortex and allow ourselves to make more reasoned
Speaker 1: decisions instead of these rash, irate, angry, emotional outbursts. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about an aspect of word that you just used
Speaker 1: a sentence or two ago when you were describing this,
Speaker 1: and you describe breathing in a light way. You know,
Speaker 1: I think there's a tendency. I've certainly had it. I
Speaker 1: learned a lot in this book and I think one
Speaker 1: of the things for me is this tendency to breathe.
Speaker 1: If I'm going to do like some sort of breathing,
Speaker 1: let's say, you know, breathing in a box or four
Speaker 1: seven eight breathing, and there's all these different ratios. Right,
Speaker 1: it's this very heavy, deep breathing, trying to suck in
Speaker 1: as much as I can. But I started to get
Speaker 1: a hint of this in a lot of the Zen
Speaker 1: training I do, where the teachers started talking about like
Speaker 1: you want to breathe in way less when you breathe in,
Speaker 1: so talk about what light means, what is breathing lightly? Well,
Speaker 1: it depends on what you're doing, right, These are different
Speaker 1: tools in the toolbox to use in different situations. So
Speaker 1: a lot of Kundalini breathing, which I'm a big fan of.
Speaker 1: You're going for it, you know. That's a lot of
Speaker 1: the breathing in in Kundalini pranayamas. And it's the same
Speaker 1: thing with Sudarsan Creo, whim Hoff method whatever. So that
Speaker 1: is designed to elicit certain reactions in your body for
Speaker 1: a short amount of time. Right, It's it's to hijack
Speaker 1: different autonomic functions. So this slower breathing, this very light breathing,
Speaker 1: this easy breathing. You can almost consider this as different
Speaker 1: kinds of music. You know, at the gym, if you
Speaker 1: want to get pumped up in the morning, maybe you
Speaker 1: want those those big, strong breaths, right. But at night,
Speaker 1: if you're cooking, if you're eating dinner, you want those
Speaker 1: slower breasts, just like you would want some slower, easier music.
Speaker 1: You know, at the gym, maybe maybe you want some
Speaker 1: death metal or something. So you know, once you understand
Speaker 1: that these are different tools in the toolboxes, a lot
Speaker 1: of people seem confused. They're like, well, you know, should
Speaker 1: I breathe too much, I breathe less? Should I hold
Speaker 1: my breath? It just depends on on the context and
Speaker 1: what you're looking for at that moment. So the slower
Speaker 1: breathing can be used, you know, whenever you're chilling out.
Speaker 1: It's it's great for focus at the beginning of the day.
Speaker 1: That's when I use it a lot. And the thing is,
Speaker 1: as as Westerners, we tend to overdo things all the time.
Speaker 1: Whenever I tell someone, you know, breathe in five to
Speaker 1: six out five to this, they say, I got it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I really feel that man um You know, this is
Speaker 1: about calming the body down and regaining control of your
Speaker 1: nervous system function and putting that back online. And so
Speaker 1: in order to do that, it should be very light
Speaker 1: and imperceptible. So a lot of people tend to stick
Speaker 1: out their stomachs every time they breathe. This should be
Speaker 1: an extremely light activity that is calming. You want to
Speaker 1: run efficiently. You don't want to wear out yourself, you know,
Speaker 1: and expend energy you don't need to expend. At some
Speaker 1: point in the book you reference that the common whiz
Speaker 1: dom is take really deep breaths if you're feeling anxious,
Speaker 1: and you talk about how that may not be the
Speaker 1: right approach. Terrible advice, and that that is coming from
Speaker 1: Alicia Murrett, who is at the Southern Methodist University. Now,
Speaker 1: she was at Stamford before that and Harvard before that,
Speaker 1: so she really knows her stuff. And she did this
Speaker 1: study about ten years ago with panic sufferers and the
Speaker 1: only thing she did was she taught them to breathe less.
Speaker 1: She was able to see a panic attack coming on
Speaker 1: an hour before by looking at people's breathing. And a
Speaker 1: lot of people who suffer from panic or asthma. When
Speaker 1: they feel that attack coming on, what did they do?
Speaker 1: They start breathing more and more and more because they
Speaker 1: feel like they're not going to be able to breathe.
Speaker 1: They feel like they're going to be denied a breath,
Speaker 1: which is about the worst thing you can do. When
Speaker 1: you overbreathe like that, you cause more vaso constriction and
Speaker 1: you exact serbate or trigger an attack. So instead of
Speaker 1: doing that, if you feel a panic attack coming on,
Speaker 1: you can train yourself to exhale longer and breathe slowly
Speaker 1: and calm yourself down. Putting your hands in front of
Speaker 1: your face is a good reminder to yourself to calm
Speaker 1: yourself down. I won't get into the biochemistry, but many
Speaker 1: asthmatics and as populations, panic suffers and people with anxiety
Speaker 1: have much lower CEO two, which means they're breathing too much,
Speaker 1: and that's slower breathing is a way to get that
Speaker 1: CEO two back on track and calm themselves down. Well,
Speaker 1: let's go into that for just a minute, the CEO two,
Speaker 1: because that's one thing that certainly I think is counterintuitive
Speaker 1: in the book, which is that we tend to think
Speaker 1: I need more oxygen. I need more oxygen. I need
Speaker 1: to get my oxygen up, whereas in reality, our problem
Speaker 1: is often too much oxygen not enough carbon dioxide. So
Speaker 1: say a little bit more about that and how we
Speaker 1: know that, because that is very counterintuitive to what almost
Speaker 1: everybody believes. The vast majority of us are Oxygen levels
Speaker 1: are fine. There's there's no such thing as having too
Speaker 1: much oxygen in our blood stream, right, you know, we'll
Speaker 1: we'll pack perhaps, But what so many of us are
Speaker 1: deficient in is c O two. Because the only way
Speaker 1: that oxygen can disassociate from the hemoglobin which is in
Speaker 1: our red blood cells is in the presence of c
Speaker 1: O two. So, for instance, if you are overbreathing right now,
Speaker 1: you're going to feel some numbness in your fingers after
Speaker 1: a while, some lightness in your head that is not
Speaker 1: caused by an increase of oxygenation in those areas, but
Speaker 1: but a decrease of circulation. So you need c O
Speaker 1: two for circulation to be a vaso dilator to your artery, veins,
Speaker 1: your blood stream, and without it, your body has a
Speaker 1: harder time of getting oxygen. So this is such confusing stuff,
Speaker 1: but it's nothing revolutionary or strange. We've known this for
Speaker 1: over a hundred and twenty years. It's just so few
Speaker 1: people consider that if you're a healthy person, your oxygen
Speaker 1: levels are going to be fine, but what you may
Speaker 1: be suffering from is a lack of proper balance of
Speaker 1: c O two because you're breathing too much, which is
Speaker 1: another reason why the idea of a healthy person going
Speaker 1: into an oxygen bar. I mean, this is not doing
Speaker 1: anything for your body. And uh, it's it's surprising that
Speaker 1: there are still oxygen bars out there because it just
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense from a biochemical standpoint. What about
Speaker 1: it altitude? If you suddenly are in the rocky mountains
Speaker 1: and you're at an altitude you're not used to, are
Speaker 1: you having an oxygen deficiency in that case? Yes, and
Speaker 1: and thank you for bringing that up. Um, So I'm
Speaker 1: talking about at sea level, a healthy person at sea level,
Speaker 1: where if if you put on a pulse ox and
Speaker 1: you're at pent huffing oxygen for half an hour is
Speaker 1: going to do nothing for you. And this is something
Speaker 1: my father in law, who's a pollon ologist, had been
Speaker 1: telling me for years and years and years, and I
Speaker 1: thought he was full of bs. Until you really look
Speaker 1: at the biochemistry, you're like, that's not going to do
Speaker 1: anything at altitude. Of course, there are huge benefits to
Speaker 1: it because there's less oxygen, or that oxygen is further apart, right,
Speaker 1: There's less pressure, so oxygen molecules are further apart. So
Speaker 1: that's why people become hypoxic at high elevations. They're blood
Speaker 1: oh two's, their blood SATs can go down to you know,
Speaker 1: eighty percent, which is really bad news. So oxygen would
Speaker 1: have a huge benefit for you at those altitudes, but
Speaker 1: I should mention there. Of course, has been studies looking
Speaker 1: into breathing more slowly and through the nose at altitudes,
Speaker 1: and in one study they found the people who were
Speaker 1: doing this instead of having their blood SATs at they
Speaker 1: were at eighty nine just by breathing more slowly and
Speaker 1: said of overbreathing like everyone else tends to do. While
Speaker 1: we're talking about chemicals, let's talk about nitric oxide. I've
Speaker 1: seen some things that you've posted recently about nitric oxide,
Speaker 1: so tell us a little bit about the role of
Speaker 1: nitric oxide. A lot of people get nitric oxide confused
Speaker 1: with nitrous oxide, which is laughing if we're not talking
Speaker 1: about whippets. I don't I'm not interested. You know a
Speaker 1: lot of people that their their interest does go out
Speaker 1: the window there. So you were, like so many other
Speaker 1: people I've talked to um this interviews over. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know what, in that case, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: nitrous oxide and all the wonderment. No, no, we won't
Speaker 1: do that. So nitric I see, oxide is this wondrous molecule.
Speaker 1: We produce a profusion of it in our sinuses about
Speaker 1: six times more than we do breathing through our mouths.
Speaker 1: And it so happens to be that the drug viagra
Speaker 1: uh sedenophil is its actual game. Guess what that does?
Speaker 1: To do? What it does, It releases nitric oxide in
Speaker 1: the body, so it allows your body to produce more
Speaker 1: nitric oxide, so you get more circulation, you know where.
Speaker 1: So we produce our own nitric oxide. We produce it
Speaker 1: throughout the body, but we produce a huge amount in
Speaker 1: our noses, which is another reason you want to be
Speaker 1: breathing through your noses. You don't want to be breathing
Speaker 1: through your mouths, not just for the you know, perhaps
Speaker 1: the sexual performance side of this. Nitric oxide is essential
Speaker 1: for circulation and oxygen delivery, which is why it's being
Speaker 1: studied in eleven clinical trials with COVID patients. The word
Speaker 1: on the street is it's working incredibly well because they
Speaker 1: tested this fifteen years ago and it worked incredibly well
Speaker 1: for the first round of stars giving people nitric oxide. Yes,
Speaker 1: because of having more nitric oxide allows you to get
Speaker 1: more oxygen. To utilize more oxygen, It opens up those bronchials,
Speaker 1: It opens up all those little arteries and allows more circulation.
Speaker 1: It would be very interesting to see a study where
Speaker 1: they would have people mouth breathing versus nasal breathing people
Speaker 1: with COVID. This is never going to happen, by the way,
Speaker 1: for ethical reasons. And if you hum, you produce fifteen
Speaker 1: times more nitric oxide by humming, So it would be
Speaker 1: great to see a real study on the effects of
Speaker 1: this with people who are chronically ill. But again I
Speaker 1: don't think that's going to happen because of ethical concerns,
Speaker 1: But I wish it would. I wish people would volunteer
Speaker 1: for this because I think we would learn so much.
Speaker 1: Fifteen times more nitric oxide than you do breathing through
Speaker 1: your mouth, or fifteen times more than you do breathing
Speaker 1: through your nose, then breathing through your mouth. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: well humming sounds good. You're gonna annoy everyone, but you
Speaker 1: know you're gonna be happier. You're gonna have better circulation.
Speaker 1: So tell them that there was one thing that you
Speaker 1: referenced in the book that really A bunch of things
Speaker 1: perked my ears up, so I shouldn't a one. The
Speaker 1: next thing in your book that really perked my ears
Speaker 1: up was you talked about a study where they gathered
Speaker 1: two decades of data from subjects and discovered that the
Speaker 1: greatest indicator of lifespan wasn't genetics, diet, or the amount
Speaker 1: of daily exercise. It was lung capacity. So say more
Speaker 1: about that, and then what are ways of developing lung
Speaker 1: capacity if that really is such an important part of longevity.
Speaker 1: Sure that study. I put it on my website and
Speaker 1: there's direct links to all of this. That's what they determined.
Speaker 1: They said, you know, lung size is very similar. It's
Speaker 1: a good marker of of lifespan. The healthier and larger
Speaker 1: your lungs are, the longer you're going to live. That's
Speaker 1: that's how the data is stacked up, which to me
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense because by having larger lungs,
Speaker 1: that means you can take fewer breaths to get that oxygen.
Speaker 1: By having these healthier lungs, that means you're getting this
Speaker 1: constant flow of energy to your body. Right, we get
Speaker 1: actually more energy from air than we do from food.
Speaker 1: And if we're doing that ineffectively, and if we're doing
Speaker 1: that in a dysfunctional way, it's going to wear us down.
Speaker 1: So the good news here is the lungs aren't like
Speaker 1: the brain or the liver or the kidneys or anything
Speaker 1: like that. The lungs and your lung capacity can change,
Speaker 1: and you can change it by force of will. You
Speaker 1: can change it by adopting healthy breathing habits. So just
Speaker 1: by doing mild to moderate exercise can increase lung capacity
Speaker 1: by about if you really go for it. If you
Speaker 1: start doing yoga, I've known people who have doubled their
Speaker 1: lung capacity. You can not only increase your lung capacity,
Speaker 1: but you can stave off that entropy that happens as
Speaker 1: we grow older and our lungs start shriveling up and
Speaker 1: go smaller and smaller and smaller. So exercise yoga is
Speaker 1: doing the type of breathing. We describe the perfect breath
Speaker 1: of five and a half in five and a half out?
Speaker 1: Does that increase the lung capacity? I believe that would
Speaker 1: help you maintain a healthy lung capacity. I've never seen
Speaker 1: any studies, longitudinal studies on that. If you think about yoga, though,
Speaker 1: what is yoga stretching and breathing. Let's stretch this arm
Speaker 1: over this way, breathe into this long let's stretch it
Speaker 1: over here. You want to keep the rib cage very flexible.
Speaker 1: And as we grow older, are rib cages start growing
Speaker 1: inwards right, or bones get more brittle, You want to
Speaker 1: keep it very flexible because you don't want breathing to
Speaker 1: be an effort, especially if you're doing it times a day.
Speaker 1: There was another fact in the book that blew my mind,
Speaker 1: which I had no idea about. What we were talking
Speaker 1: about carbon dioxide would have been the time to bring
Speaker 1: it up, which is that when you're losing weight, you
Speaker 1: correct me something like of the weight that you lose,
Speaker 1: you breathe out. That's right. Yeah, a lot of people
Speaker 1: think that when we lose weight, uh, it comes off
Speaker 1: in sweat or or whatever. But none of that makes
Speaker 1: sense if you really look at the science. And that's
Speaker 1: what I was just so amazed when I was researching
Speaker 1: this book that there are such simple things that we
Speaker 1: have accepted in our culture as being correct, as being
Speaker 1: the conventional wisdom. If you're having a panic attack, you
Speaker 1: need to breathe away more. If you're having an asthmattack,
Speaker 1: we're breathing way more. None of this is based on anything.
Speaker 1: There's no paper that ever proved this. And so this
Speaker 1: guy in Australia wanted he was a biophysicist, I believe,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to figure out what happened when we
Speaker 1: lose weight, because weight just doesn't disappear. It's it's an energy, right,
Speaker 1: it needs to go somewhere. And he found out that
Speaker 1: for every ten pounds that you lose, eight and a
Speaker 1: half pounds of that comes out through your lungs. When
Speaker 1: I read that, I was like, that is certainly not correct.
Speaker 1: All right, I trust James to some degree, but that
Speaker 1: that sounds not like it's right. But I was. I
Speaker 1: went out and did the research. I was like, I'll
Speaker 1: be damned sure it's true. Yeah, yeah, I had to
Speaker 1: really double down on this because I didn't believe it either.
Speaker 1: And my editor the whole time was like, this can't
Speaker 1: be true, this can't You can't heat your body up
Speaker 1: with breathing. You can't heal yourself of autoimmune diseases with breathing.
Speaker 1: So she worked at NASA before she became a book editor,
Speaker 1: so she was such a hardass, and I thank her
Speaker 1: for for really putting me through the ringer, because with
Speaker 1: these impossible claims, you really need to support it with science.
Speaker 1: And I put the entire bibliography up on my website
Speaker 1: that anyone can can go look at those five studies,
Speaker 1: and I put videos up there and the data sheets
Speaker 1: and all that, and you can you can peruse for yourself.
Speaker 1: So we've talked about this sort of standard quote unquote
Speaker 1: perfect breath. You know, breathing lightly five to six times
Speaker 1: per minute is sort of an ideal calming breath, sort
Speaker 1: of an ideal day to day breath. But in the
Speaker 1: book you go into a lot of you call it
Speaker 1: breathing plus techniques. You referenced wim Hoff a little while ago.
Speaker 1: We had whim on the show, I don't know, a
Speaker 1: couple of months ago. So let's talk about some of
Speaker 1: the benefits or the things that can happen if we
Speaker 1: breathe in more extreme ways. So let's just talk about,
Speaker 1: you know, whim Hoff for a minute and talk about
Speaker 1: his breathing method. And also, I think it'll be interesting
Speaker 1: to sort of I'm glad that you eventually got to
Speaker 1: it because it was a question that I was thinking
Speaker 1: all through the book. Was boy, all, this sounds very
Speaker 1: different than what whim Hoff advocates, right, say a little
Speaker 1: bit more about this breathing. Plus, So it's interesting when
Speaker 1: you see wim Hoff on YouTube or if you see
Speaker 1: him live, you only see the whim Hoff that's like
Speaker 1: turned on and amped up to eleven. Right, breathe, everybody
Speaker 1: breathe to breathe. There you go, Okay, you're a convert
Speaker 1: as well. So a few people see him and the
Speaker 1: other twenty three and a half hours of the day
Speaker 1: and guess how he's breathing entirely through his nose, extremely slowly.
Speaker 1: He hums a lot, and he is completely chill. So
Speaker 1: the breathing that he has become so attached to is
Speaker 1: equivalent to going to the gym. Right. This This is
Speaker 1: breathing where you just blow it out, You work yourself
Speaker 1: out so that the rest of the day you can relax.
Speaker 1: You've done your work for the day, and now your
Speaker 1: body is acclimated. It's at this nice spot. So all
Speaker 1: of this stuff was so confusing to me because some
Speaker 1: people like Boutaco, people are saying you have to breathe less.
Speaker 1: Women saying you have to breathe more. Holotropic breathwork people
Speaker 1: are saying you have to breathe for three hours as
Speaker 1: hard as you possibly can, and this is the way
Speaker 1: you're gonna And I was like, who is right, And
Speaker 1: the answer is they're all right. It depends on the context.
Speaker 1: So for the same reason you wouldn't go to a
Speaker 1: gym for twenty four hours a day is the same
Speaker 1: reason you would never do whim Hoff's breathing, for you
Speaker 1: know more than that thirty minutes at a time, and
Speaker 1: this kind of breathing, you are purposely stressing your body out,
Speaker 1: just like at the gym. You are purposely stressing your
Speaker 1: body out to build yourself up to become more fit
Speaker 1: so that the rest of the day you can take
Speaker 1: that time off and having done your work. It is
Speaker 1: a pressure release valve. And so you could call it
Speaker 1: whim Hoff method, you could call it TUMO, you call
Speaker 1: it to dar Crea prea, are prey whatever, it's all
Speaker 1: doing the same general thing. I realize it gets confusing,
Speaker 1: But the middle of the book I tried to establish
Speaker 1: I was like, this foundation of healthy breathing. This is
Speaker 1: a benefit to everyone who's who's an asthmatic ultramarathon or
Speaker 1: or a cyclist or an office jockey. You will all
Speaker 1: benefit from breathing out the nose, breathing slowly, breathing lightly
Speaker 1: and deeply. And then once you have that down, you
Speaker 1: can go off into some really weird areas into how
Speaker 1: to superheat your body or get rid of autoimmune diseases,
Speaker 1: you know, or get shot up with the coli and
Speaker 1: breathe in a pattern to battle the indotoxins. That's what
Speaker 1: I saved for that. I call it breathing plus because
Speaker 1: it's the next step up the ladder of where breathing
Speaker 1: can take us. And you mentioned there you sort of
Speaker 1: grouped a bunch of things together. You've you've grouped whim
Speaker 1: half together, stars and crea prani yama. Often kundalini breathing
Speaker 1: falls into this category. Something you called that you said
Speaker 1: was tumo, which is an ancient Tibetan I believe style
Speaker 1: of breathing, So you sort of group those together, sort
Speaker 1: of say in what way they're common? What what are
Speaker 1: you doing in that style of breathing for people who
Speaker 1: may not be familiar. These are all variations on a theme.
Speaker 1: And when I started really looking at these implotting them out,
Speaker 1: you know, it was like the usual Suspects moment where
Speaker 1: I was just like, every thing is lining up in
Speaker 1: a certain way. They're all doing the same general thing,
Speaker 1: but they're called different names, they're developed at different times,
Speaker 1: they're slight variations here and there, but they're all adhering
Speaker 1: to the same practice. And the practices you purposely overbreathe
Speaker 1: for a certain amount of time, then you purposely underbreathe
Speaker 1: for a certain amount of time, and oftentimes as a
Speaker 1: whim hop method in tuma, you hold your breath, so
Speaker 1: you go from to holding your breath to excelling really
Speaker 1: long and do it all over again. So this is
Speaker 1: essentially interval training for your lungs, for your cardio respiratory system.
Speaker 1: That's what it is. I think that's a really useful
Speaker 1: way to frame it. Right. As I've studied what do
Speaker 1: we want to do for cardio, and we think of
Speaker 1: like cardio exercise, right, and it appears that more and
Speaker 1: more what we're seeing is you want long periods reference
Speaker 1: film aftone in your book. So so this is basically
Speaker 1: what you say. They're right, Uh, we want these long
Speaker 1: periods of sustained effort at a pretty low amount of
Speaker 1: strain on our body, often referred to his zone to cardio.
Speaker 1: But you know you're on the lower end and you
Speaker 1: want a lot of that. And then there is some
Speaker 1: belief some people disagree on this, but there certainly seems
Speaker 1: to be a fair amount of belief also that there's
Speaker 1: a time and a place for some really high intensity work.
Speaker 1: You know they called VO two max work in the
Speaker 1: cycling world, or interval training or tobada training right where
Speaker 1: we're going kind of all out. So I think the
Speaker 1: analogy you're making there of this gentle slow, you know,
Speaker 1: five to six breaths per minute is sort of an
Speaker 1: ideal zone to cardio place to be right. You want
Speaker 1: to spend a lot more time there, and then there
Speaker 1: is a place for some people to do this much
Speaker 1: more intense whim off to mo praniama type breathing. That's
Speaker 1: exactly right, And it also depends on what you're looking for.
Speaker 1: So I know whim I've talked to him several times,
Speaker 1: and he's an amazing guy. I think he's brought breathing
Speaker 1: awareness to more people than than anyone else, you know,
Speaker 1: at least in the last twenty years or so. And
Speaker 1: he is a huge proponent of his breathing technique. He
Speaker 1: calls it his breathing technique. But he's also very clear
Speaker 1: that he's like, I didn't invent any of this stuff.
Speaker 1: It's been around for thousands of years. It's just had
Speaker 1: these different names on it. You know, if you really
Speaker 1: want to wrung yourself up, if you really want to
Speaker 1: hop up to that next stage, if you're healthy and
Speaker 1: want to go into a next level of potential, you
Speaker 1: can try these things out. What's interesting or maybe not interesting,
Speaker 1: shouldn't be surprising, is different breathing techniques that are all
Speaker 1: around the same variations on this theme. They so happened
Speaker 1: to affect people in the same way. If you look
Speaker 1: at how Sudarshan Crea affects people, it's so similar to
Speaker 1: the benefits behind whim Off breathing because these things are
Speaker 1: doing the same thing. You know, my job is great
Speaker 1: in the respect that I'm able to talk to people
Speaker 1: who have had their lives transformed, like utterly transformed by
Speaker 1: just healthy, practical breathing habits. I know that seems like
Speaker 1: a real pie in the sky stuff, but but it's not,
Speaker 1: especially with asthma, even autoimmune diseases. And there's so much
Speaker 1: exciting research happening right now in this field. In the
Speaker 1: next couple of years, we're going to know even more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think you do a nice job of also
Speaker 1: painting a picture at different points in the book of
Speaker 1: Look and you've done a nice job of it in
Speaker 1: this interview is saying, well, you know, these things can
Speaker 1: help for certain things and certain people, And no, you're
Speaker 1: probably not going to cure cancer with the way you breathe.
Speaker 1: There a certain amount of science that backs this up,
Speaker 1: and there's a certain amount of things that we see
Speaker 1: from a lot of people anecdotally. So there's real potential
Speaker 1: in this. And as you said, it's not a panacea.
Speaker 1: It's not you know, it's not like, well, just breathe
Speaker 1: a certain way every day and then go ahead and
Speaker 1: go on the ding dong a day diet and everything
Speaker 1: will be fine. Yeah, it's for the same reason that
Speaker 1: that exercise is an a panacea, or nutrition is an
Speaker 1: a panacea, although we do know that eating certain foods
Speaker 1: will decrease your risk of getting certain cancers right and
Speaker 1: in other chronic problems in life, we know that in
Speaker 1: the same thing with exercise, well, breathing is right along
Speaker 1: with those those other two for sure. And it's always
Speaker 1: been there. Uh. This was considered a very powerful medicine
Speaker 1: in ancient cultures, and that's all cool and peachy and great.
Speaker 1: But now we have the technologies to measure what actually
Speaker 1: happens in the body when we breathe in different ways.
Speaker 1: And that's what I think is so exciting. Like, if
Speaker 1: you don't believe me, all you need to do is
Speaker 1: get a pulse ox cimeter on your finger and watch
Speaker 1: how breathing affects you. If you don't believe me, get
Speaker 1: a blood pressure monitor and take your blood pressure before
Speaker 1: and after doing some breathing exercises and tell me what
Speaker 1: your blood pressure is. So I've done this. I've watched
Speaker 1: my blood pressure go down ten to fifteen points after
Speaker 1: two minutes by breathing in certain ways. And and that's
Speaker 1: not some outrageous claim. This is basic physiology. This is
Speaker 1: how our bodies work. It's just been so out in
Speaker 1: left field and in my opinion, pretty muddled over by
Speaker 1: a lot of sort of new age high claims that
Speaker 1: this stuff can do everything for everyone, which it can't,
Speaker 1: but it can do a whole bunch, and the fact
Speaker 1: that it's available to everyone without a subscription, without a
Speaker 1: prescription is to me even better. That's a great place
Speaker 1: to wrap up but I'm not quite going to wrap
Speaker 1: us up there because i have one more question. It
Speaker 1: ties into what you just said there, and it's this
Speaker 1: idea of no subscription, no prescription. Like the stuff that
Speaker 1: you're describing is pretty straightforward, right, the way to breathe it.
Speaker 1: You just you basically laid out several of the key
Speaker 1: things doing things like learning to do Praniyama breathing or
Speaker 1: the whim Hoff method. Those things are freely available out
Speaker 1: there and you can learn them. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of people who want to charge a lot of money
Speaker 1: to learn to really do this stuff right. And I'm
Speaker 1: kind of curious, in your opinion, is there really that
Speaker 1: much more to learn? Is it really worth some of
Speaker 1: these expensive programs to really learn to do the perfect breath,
Speaker 1: to do coherent breathing or is it about as simple
Speaker 1: as you're describing. Well, think about nutrition, right. You can
Speaker 1: give someone a sheet of paper that says, here is
Speaker 1: the best way for you to eat, cut out all
Speaker 1: processed foods, period. We know this to be true, just
Speaker 1: eat whole foods. How easy is that? You know, in
Speaker 1: one sentence you can give someone that. Will they adhere
Speaker 1: to it? Now? They won't. It's the same thing with
Speaker 1: with exercise in many ways. So you know what I'm
Speaker 1: getting at here is it depends on who you are.
Speaker 1: If you're a big self starter who wants to take
Speaker 1: control of his or her breathing and who wants to
Speaker 1: go buy these gizmos, you can absolutely do that, you know,
Speaker 1: with no more technology than than our brains and our
Speaker 1: lips and our lungs. You can do that. But some
Speaker 1: people need a helping hand, just like some people need
Speaker 1: a fitness coach, and some people need a nutritionist, and
Speaker 1: some people need cookbooks, you know. And so there's absolutely
Speaker 1: a place for breathing therapists, especially for people who have
Speaker 1: chronic issues anxiety, asthma, panic, and arexia. I mean, on
Speaker 1: and on and on. Breathing can have such a profound
Speaker 1: effect on on these people and they need a lot
Speaker 1: of assistance not only to keep with it, but but
Speaker 1: to understand what's happening in their bodies. Excellent. That is
Speaker 1: a great answer. Thank you James so much for your time.
Speaker 1: You and I are going to talk briefly in the
Speaker 1: post show conversation about an area that we didn't even
Speaker 1: get to at all, which is really about chewing and
Speaker 1: why we have crooked teeth and why we might actually
Speaker 1: be dis evolving in certain ways. You and I'll talk
Speaker 1: about that in the post show conversation. Listeners you can
Speaker 1: get access to that and other things like a weekly
Speaker 1: teaching song and a poem episode. I do add free
Speaker 1: episodes and lots of other great things at one you feed,
Speaker 1: dot net slash Join James, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: coming on. Like I said, I really enjoyed the book.
Speaker 1: We didn't even get into all the wonderful stories that
Speaker 1: are in the book and all the all the characters
Speaker 1: that you meet along the way and the things that
Speaker 1: you do. We kind of stayed very dry, but the
Speaker 1: book is not dry at all. So again, thanks so much.
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot for having me. If what you just
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