Men Talking Mindfulness With James Nestor - Breath

The Men Talking Mindfulness Podcast - Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider interview best-selling author, James Nestor, about his book, Breath. In Breath, we learn that we no longer breathe the way we were intended to and ways to get back to breathing better!

Transcript

🎶 What happens when two dudes,

One a retired Navy SEAL commander in Colorado Springs and the other a hippie meditation teacher in New York City get together to discuss living mindfully?

That's a great question because we don't know what will happen either.

Raw,

Uncut and unapologetic.

Welcome to Men Talking Mindfulness with co-hosts John McCaskill and Will Schneider.

Each week we take an authentic dive into how mindfulness continually impacts our lives,

Deepens our relationships and allows us to be emotionally alive.

We filter all of our conversations through the man box where we unpack how as men we are expected to act in society,

How fighting the authentic human experience is exhausting and damaging and how mindfulness can help.

Now onto the show.

All right,

Here we are Men Talking Mindfulness on a special day,

A Tuesday outside of our regularly scheduled shows.

Me and Will are super excited about today's show.

Today we've got our guest,

Mr.

James Nestor,

Author of the New York Times bestseller Breath,

The New Science of a Lost Art and the book is just unbelievably fascinating and has changed the way that I sleep,

The way that I exercise.

I know the same can be said for Will,

The way that I eat and we're going to get into more of that here shortly and we'll get more of a thorough bio intro for James.

But first Will for some announcements.

Couple announcements everybody.

We still have coming up in September 15th.

We're going to,

Instead of taking this out of podcast and giving you an experience of mindfulness we've joined with,

Partnered with Movement Rx.

So check out the great work we're doing with them.

We're going to be,

We have,

What do we have,

September 9th to September 2nd.

We have some info webinars we can jump into if you want to find out more about how this can help you and help your life and also begin to develop the practical side of mindfulness and what it can do for you.

We also have our merchandise.

John's wearing the shirt.

On the back we have raw,

Uncut,

Unapologetic.

We also have some hoodies.

We decided for this first cut to go with just charcoal gray color that we're going to do in hoodies,

Males and male and female t-shirts as well as hoodies.

And that's going to only run for 17 days.

That is going to end on September 6th.

And we just dropped the link in the feed here.

So get your merch.

We already have some sales,

John.

My cousin told me.

So that's really cool.

So,

All right,

Well,

That's enough of this.

Let's go bring James up.

There he is.

All right.

There he is.

James,

Great to have you.

Very excited about today's show.

And before we get too much into the talk,

I'll just intro you for our audience,

Though I think most of the folks watching and listening today already know because we've been pimping the show and I know your book has been well read.

So James,

He's an author,

A journalist who has written for Scientific American outside the New York Times and much more.

His latest book right here,

Breath,

The New Science of a Lost Art.

And I sound a little breathy as I announce that.

So I guess I'm going along with the theme.

That was released May 26th last year and was an instant New York Times and London Sunday Times bestseller.

Breath explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly and how to get it back.

Breath spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in its first 11 months of release and will be translated into more than 30 languages in 2021.

Breath was awarded the best general nonfiction book of 2020 by the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

And Nestor has spoken at Stanford Medical School,

Yale School of Medicine,

Harvard Medical School,

The United Nations Global Classroom,

And appeared on more than 60 radio and television shows.

James,

Welcome to the show.

As I said,

In the green room prior to hitting record or stream.

So excited to have you here today.

Can't wait to get into this interview.

Reading Breath,

I felt at times like I was reading one of Dan Brown's books,

Kind of The Da Vinci Code with you down below the streets of Paris in the catacombs.

But your book is all true and just mind blowing.

And your partner in the breathing study at Stanford,

Anders Olson,

He's just a character.

So so excited to have you with us today.

Thanks a lot for having me.

After that intro,

I'm just going to warn everyone that this talk is going to probably be terribly disappointing.

So everyone be prepared for disappointment.

We'll build you back up,

James.

No problem.

We got you,

James.

We got you.

We got a weight on your shoulders now.

Well,

Yeah.

Well,

That makes us a little nervous.

What we do to ground the show is we do a little grounding practice,

James.

So everybody,

This is something that we've been put in the show like from actually one of the first few first episodes,

Just as a means to practice more mindfulness.

I'm actually going to read a quote from your book,

James,

That I think will help us deepen our grounding practice.

And you say in the book,

The deeper and more softly we breathe in and the longer we exhale,

The more slowly the heart beats and the calmer we become.

So maybe this can all help us,

Right,

To just ground a little bit,

Be a little more present for the show.

So we're going to take a few moments.

We always say if you're out there,

If you're sitting,

You can ground your feet.

John likes to take his shoes off.

I'm always barefoot.

If you're driving,

Don't close your eyes,

But you can still do this simple breathing practice.

And if you're anywhere else,

Just kind of stop what you're doing and take a moment and maybe interlace your hands or ground your feet on the floor if you're sitting down.

Close the eyes if that's safe for you.

And we're just going to take some slow,

Calm breaths to help us to relax and also to slow our heart beat.

We're going to do a simple inhaling for five seconds,

Exhaling very slowly out for five seconds.

Everything is going to flow in and out through the nose,

Which we're going to talk about later,

Why nostril breathing is so important.

But we'll just start with a nice little exhale out the nose.

Try to empty all the breath out and even like pull your diaphragm all the way up underneath the rib cage.

Take a completely extinguish that exhale and let's take an inhale for five,

Four,

Three,

Two,

One.

Very nice and exhale,

Five,

Four,

Three,

Two,

One.

Good.

Inhale again for five.

Nice and smooth and easy.

Exhaling flowing out for five,

Four,

Three,

Two,

One.

Let's do a few more.

In for five.

Five easy for five.

And just two more.

Inhale.

Exhale easy.

Now we'll just do one more in for five,

Exhale five.

Just taking these last few moments,

Just feel how you're feeling.

You're a little bit less anxious or more present or whatever's going on.

Just kind of checking in emotionally as a part of that being more mindful,

The increasing our emotional literacy just by being aware of our feelings.

Good.

When you're ready,

Open your eyes.

Let's start the show.

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

James,

Again,

Super excited to have you here.

I'll just jump right into some of the questions and we were talking about before we hit stream.

You did an amazing amount of research into all this from breath work,

Improving our dental structure,

To healing scoliosis,

To helping with emphysema,

To improving athletic performance at some of the highest levels,

To helping sleeping and feeling better.

I mean,

You covered a lot in this book.

That all said,

Your research into this had to start somewhere.

Can you tell us how this all started?

Yeah,

It wasn't one thing in particular.

It was several things that kept adding up over several years.

So it's not like I woke up one day and said,

I'm going to write a book about breathing.

That would be a really bad idea.

Even when I thought that there would be a steeper story in this,

I brought it to my agent,

My editor,

And they thought it was idiotic.

They said,

This is definitely not going to work.

You need to think of something else.

For me,

It was both personal experience and professional experience.

Personally,

I was suffering from respiratory problems.

I was exercising all the time.

I was eating the right food,

Getting eight hours of sleep,

Doing everything right,

Quote,

Unquote.

But I kept coming down with bronchitis,

Mild pneumonia,

Wheezing when I was working out.

If I was doing martial arts or surfing,

Whatever,

My breathing just kind of felt off.

When I asked anybody about this,

From doctors to physical therapists to meditation people,

I didn't get too much context on it.

The doctor said,

Oh,

Welcome to middle-aged,

Which is what happens to your body as you get older.

Wow.

I didn't really go for that.

After dealing with this for actually a couple of years,

I was invited to go to a breathing workshop,

Which in San Francisco,

These things are a dime a dozen,

Right?

They're on the corner.

I just picked one randomly and had a pretty powerful experience there.

But as a science journalist,

I didn't know what to do with that experience,

Right?

I'm not going to write a memoir.

So it wasn't until about two years after that that I met free divers.

And I understood how you could use breathing to do something that was supposed to be scientifically,

Medically impossible.

And yet these people are doing it every day.

I said,

Okay,

These people can clearly demonstrate that they're doing an impossible thing.

And we can understand the body in a different way.

Where else can breathing take us?

And so that was really the jumping off point for me.

It's not a clean answer.

So I gave you a bit of a circuitous route into how I got started,

But it was just so many things happening over a long amount of time.

Nice.

Go ahead,

John.

Well,

Yeah,

Sure.

I'll jump into the Stanford experiment and not the one where we're talking about the,

I think the Stanford experiment.

If you just say that everyone thinks about the jail experiment,

But the experiment that you did specifically with Andrew- The 10 days,

Right?

Yeah.

Can you speak to that?

Yeah.

So I did not set out to do a lot of self experimentation in this book.

I know that seems crazy for people who have read this book,

But I can prove this when a nonfiction,

You submit about a 50,

60 page proposal and what the book is going to be about.

Then you get this little modicum of cash to go out and write it.

And they keep you really poor and hungry,

So you want to finish it.

So in that proposal,

I had no part in this book and I didn't want to be,

Because it always bothers me,

Especially nonfiction and science nonfiction,

When the author puts himself or herself in too much into the story.

But I finally came to a head when I wanted to get some data and some research on a few things that did not exist.

Literally nobody studied it.

And so after having many conversations with Dr.

Jayak or Nayak,

Who's the chief of rhinology research at Stanford over a series of months,

I kept asking them,

Well,

How quickly can mouth breathing damage us?

And can we restore ourselves through nasal breathing?

How quickly does that happen?

Nobody knows.

Nobody's tested this.

He thought doing so with humans would be unethical.

They've done it with monkeys and those stories are horrifying.

That was terribly sad.

Yeah,

So sad.

But they've never done it with people.

So I volunteered because he said that there's no way.

He said ethically he would have a problem getting subjects to do an experiment like this.

I said,

Well,

What if I volunteer?

He's like,

Well,

I have no money.

I said,

Well,

What if I pay for it?

Which at that time I didn't know it was going to be as expensive as it was.

But I convinced Anders Olson,

Big nasal breathing guy,

Said,

You've got to walk the walk now.

You've got to come out here and join this study.

And he came out.

So for a month to go.

So for people who haven't read the book or don't know,

We spent 10 days just breathing through our mouths.

We were completely obstructed,

Zero breath through our nose.

And then we spent 10 days breathing through our nose the vast majority of time.

And we compared data sets.

We took data three times a day,

Every day.

We took every imaginable marker you could imagine.

And we looked at this to see how nasal breathing and how mouth breathing would really affect the body in different ways.

What was it like being a guinea pig in your own book?

And it seems like honestly,

You actually turned into a pulmonaut yourself a little bit.

So just curious what the experience was like.

It makes it easier when you have these experiences yourself,

Because then you can explain them to the reader.

And so my role as a journalist,

Trying to be a very objective journalist,

Is to go into worlds,

Go into fields I know nothing about.

I don't want to know about these subjects so that I'm starting in the same place as the reader.

At the beginning of the book,

It's like,

Hey,

I've heard some weird stuff about this particular subject.

These people are able to do this thing.

I know nothing about it.

Come with me.

I'm going to go try to figure it out the best I can.

And so that's my approach to these subjects.

So going into the mouth breathing,

Nasal breathing,

To be clear,

A study with two people proves nothing.

I get that.

I understand that.

What we were doing was just supported by what scientists have known for decades and decades.

We were just experiencing it personally.

And so to personally experience all these things you've read about in 20 different studies allows you a deeper insight into how these different pathways of breathing really directly affect us,

Not years from now,

But in the moment.

And so to me,

What was interesting is not to just do what some people thought was a super size me stunt,

Where I'm just thinking through my mouth.

25 to 50% of the population is habitually mouth breathing.

So we were just putting ourselves into a position that so many people know.

During allergy season,

Go look around and you can see so many people are plugged up.

So that's what we were doing is just reflecting.

I was trying to magnify what science has already known and experiencing it personally.

Did you think that the results that you experienced both physically and then when you looked at the data,

Did you think it would be that dramatic?

No,

Not at all.

And honestly,

There's no way I would have done it if I'm being completely truthful.

So the first couple of days,

We were hanging out and we were actually down here,

I sat at my lab in the downstairs of my house and we were cracking up.

We're like,

Oh,

This is so stupid,

Trying to go out to lunch and eat and people are looking at you and whatever.

This is with your nose plugged?

This is with your nose plugged?

Yeah,

We had nose plugged and we had tape on there off the top.

You look as crazy as any New Yorker.

Yeah,

And everyone thought that we had,

This happened numerous times,

Thought that we had both gotten nose jobs.

Some people were saying like,

Congratulations.

If I had just gotten a nose job and they left this.

I've got the same thing going.

I had not done a good job,

So it was,

People thought we both got in a car accident and we hit our heads on the dashboard or we were boxing.

People would say,

Who won the fight?

It was kind of funny and mixing it up a little bit.

And then after five days,

It's like the laughs and giggles started really going away when our sleep was so devastated,

Snoring through half the night,

Sleep apnea,

Stressed out,

Brain fog constantly.

And it was really,

Really painful.

And I couldn't help thinking about all those kids and so many people who were told that just breathing through your mouth is normal,

Being constantly obstructed is normal and just get on with life.

It seems like we've been missing this huge part of our health and it's just the pathway through which you breathe makes such a huge difference to everything really.

Yeah,

It's wild.

I'm glad you mentioned the sleep there because Will and I have,

As I mentioned in the beginning,

We've changed the way we sleep.

We both sleep with our mouths taped.

And for listeners who haven't read the book that I'm sure sounds wazoo,

Why are you sleeping with your mouth taped?

Well,

I mean,

Can you tell the audience why,

One,

Why we would be doing that and then two,

What the benefits of doing such are?

So when you want to become a nasal breather,

It's easier to do in the daytime than it is to do at night.

So in the day,

You can think about it,

Right?

Oh,

I'm breathing through my mouth.

I'm going to close my mouth.

I'm going to breathe through my nose.

When you're working out,

You can force yourself to breathe through your nose.

At night,

What happens?

Your muscles relax.

You go unconscious.

And so many of us,

More than 60% of the population breathes with an open mouth at night,

More than 60%.

It's probably way more than that.

So what can you do about it?

And what I had been told is not a lot.

And if you look at mouth breathing and snoring and sleep apnea,

You can increase,

Sometimes significantly increase your chances of suffering from both snoring and sleep apnea.

Now,

To be clear,

It depends where that snoring is occurring,

Where that sleep apnea is occurring.

Not everyone will benefit from closing their mouth at night who snores or has sleep apnea.

This is not a blanket prescription.

But for a lot of people,

It makes a huge difference.

The reason is that when you close your mouth,

Right now you can open your mouth,

Right?

And you're going to feel your tongue sort of rocking back into your throat.

When you close your mouth,

That tongue rocks up to the upper palate,

Opens your airway.

When you breathe through your nose as well,

You create more pressure in the airway,

Which helps to open it so you can breathe more easily.

So they used to have,

100 years ago,

They sold chin straps to do this.

They knew how damaging it was 100 years ago,

Right?

And they had all these different products to close your mouth at night.

I wasn't too into the chin strap idea.

And I had heard about how taping your mouth at night could be beneficial.

I thought this was just complete idiocy.

And I went on YouTube and I looked at these videos and it looked even more idiotic.

So I discounted everything until I started talking to top researchers in sleep medicine and in speech language pathology and athletics.

And they all have been doing this,

Some of them freaks,

And having huge success with their clients and patients.

I think where people get the sleep tape thing wrong is they tend to think like it's a fat strip of duct tape across the mouth or it's several pieces of tape.

You don't need that.

What I've found is,

Look at how conveniently I happen to have some right now.

I keep a role next to this desk here because usually people ask me about this,

But a size of about the size of a postage stamp.

And you can just,

This is the technology you guys,

This is the latest,

Greatest.

I'm in San Francisco,

Silicon Valley.

We have that in New York.

We are only into digital disruption.

So here's a little bit of that.

This is it.

I can still talk to you.

I can still cough.

I can still breathe.

But when I go unconscious,

What does this do?

Keeps your mouth closed.

It keeps my mouth closed.

The tape is supposed to come off that easily.

Take it off with your tongue.

It comes right off.

At any time in the night,

If you want it to come off,

You just open your mouth.

So this is such a simple thing.

It seems like it's not going to do anything for many people.

But this is the one thing I've heard from literally thousands and thousands of people now that they're no longer snoring.

They know they have reduced their sleep apnea or eliminated it.

Not for everybody.

Some people have problems in the nasal pharynx,

Which this isn't going to do much for.

But this is a free hack.

You're only going to benefit from nasal breathing.

So I figure why not give it a go?

And now there's a big study booting up at Stanford with 200 people suffering from sleep apnea looking at how sleep tape might affect their condition.

And there needs to be more science,

More studies on this.

There's zero money to be made from this,

Which makes it harder to fund these studies.

But this is something that anyone can try out.

Yeah.

Well,

I mean,

On my personal level,

I know John,

Like I've been doing it since like May.

Like I read this book.

I read the tape reading about the tape in the book.

And one thing that really stuck out of me was the vasopressin.

And I felt like this is like I've been calling it to my friends and telling people about it.

This is like the camel hormone.

You know,

It helps us to hold water.

You know what I mean?

It really does.

And and that was enough for me.

And I know John's like John's heart rate variability.

First night he did it just like spiked skyrocketed when a giant you know,

Because and I just I feel more hydrated throughout the day.

I don't get up at night to go and pee.

I feel like also this could be a great way to kind of crush some of the water crisis out there in California.

People stop drinking their water at night and flushing their toilets all evening.

Right.

I mean,

Just a little hack there maybe.

But it's really done.

I never feel like I'm ever dehydrated now because I'm always like for some reason after doing this for four weeks or months,

I just you know,

My skin isn't dry.

Like it's amazing just the water retention I'm feeling and I get a better night's sleep,

Much deeper sleep just by putting a simple piece of tape over my mouth.

Yeah.

Amazing.

What's great is this stuff can be measured.

This isn't just subjective,

Right?

It's great to say,

Hey,

I feel better doing this.

That means something.

But but as a as a journalist,

It needs to be measured and replicable for it to be legit,

At least in my opinion.

And we know that you lose 42 percent more moisture when you're breathing through your mouth.

Do that eight hours a night.

What's going to happen?

You're going to go to bed every single night with a jug of water like this.

That is tea,

Everybody.

Don't don't get nervous,

Which is what I did for decades.

And I thought it was normal.

Didn't matter if I was in a hotel room,

Didn't matter if I was camping,

Didn't matter if I was home.

I had to go to sleep with this huge thing of water.

I would just hit on it all night.

I would wake up and hit on it.

And if you look at sleep quality,

Mine was so drastically changed.

And I didn't want to put this in the book again because I didn't want to make the book about me or my experience because I'm just one person.

But my heart rate variability went through the roof when I started out,

And I've heard this from so many people.

If you look at deep sleep to some of the,

You know,

Or ring whoop there,

Some of their data isn't super accurate,

But it provides a general overview,

Which I think is very helpful.

And deep sleep can profoundly increase when you're resting better.

And we know that you're resting better,

You're able to restore better when you breathe through the nose,

As long as you don't have obstruction.

So the idea that you're not waking up as often,

That you wake up with more energy,

That you wake up and you're not dehydrated,

All of this is measurable.

And once you do it,

I think you really become convinced,

Especially if you're one of those people who likes to measure your health throughout the day,

You can see your own measurements,

Right?

And you can see how it's working for you.

But it transformed my sleep.

But I was so happy,

But also completely pissed off that no one had told me this in my teenage years or,

You know,

My 20s or my 30s.

But you know,

So it goes.

We know it now.

And this is one thing that anyone can really experiment with and see if it works for you.

One last benefit that you mentioned about dentists say it's the number one reason for cavities or something,

Right?

They're breathing through the mouth.

They've been saying that.

They've literally been saying that for over 100 years.

So I found studies from 120 years ago,

Dentists saying mouth breathing is contributing to cavities.

It's contributing to periodontal disease.

I was just spent a few days with a leading dental researcher,

Dr.

Kevin Boyd,

Whom I learned so much of this stuff from.

And he is convinced the number one cause of cavities is mouth breathing.

That's not to say sugar doesn't affect cavities.

It does,

Right?

You can't go eat a bunch of,

You know,

Gummy bears and think you're always going to be fine.

But the shift in acidity that happens in pH in your mouth through mouth breathing is so dramatic and it creates a breeding ground for bacteria that degrades your teeth.

We've known this for a long time.

And yet you see all these kids breathing with an open mouth throughout their entire youth and then adults do the same thing.

And it's just such bad news.

Right.

I want to go back to the vasopressin really fast,

Not so much for a question,

But a statement just kind of echoing what you had already said is that I've for probably the last 15 years,

I've gotten up two or three times a night to pee.

And I recently started sleeping under a weighted blanket and then taping my mouth.

And that allowed me to get into that deep sleep,

Which I thought was,

It was kind of counterintuitive.

I thought taping my mouth,

I wouldn't be able to sleep,

But the taping my mouth allowed me to get into the deep sleep,

Which allowed me to secrete the vasopressin,

Not get up to have to pee,

Which allowed me to have better sleep,

Which ultimately fed to a better day.

The next day,

I just felt so much better.

And it's just that if you,

If you take nothing else away from this book,

Or at least if I took nothing else away,

I would say this book was worth a fortune.

I considered going to see the doctors and everything else.

And this simple little hack has changed the way I sleep and the way I feel.

So thank you for that.

So go ahead.

I learned that from,

Just to put credit where credit is due,

I learned this from Dr.

Mark Burhenne,

Who's been studying sleep.

He's a dentist,

But he's also a sleep specialist.

He's been in this game for 30 years.

People were accusing him of being a quack and all this crap,

But his patients kept getting better dramatically.

So everything I learned about vasopressin and deep sleep and the importance of getting into deep sleep so that you release this,

Because deep sleep happens at the beginning of the night,

Right?

It doesn't happen at the end.

It gets,

Our sleep tends to get lighter and lighter and lighter towards the end of our sleep cycle.

So to have that dump at the beginning of the night prepares you for the rest of the hours that you're going to be sleeping.

So of course,

Water is going to influence this too.

This doesn't mean you can chug 64 ounces of water before you think you're going to pee because you,

You know,

You're a camel now.

But I've noticed if I drink a little less water at night and you know,

I use the tape,

I love the weighted blankets.

I love having something,

You know,

You're in a safe,

Comfortable environment.

I used to get up about two to three times to pee at night.

Isn't this great?

We're just talking about our pee schedule here.

We're going to move on to like something else too.

Anyway,

Back to urination just for a moment,

But just like you,

I was chugging water at night and peeing through and I just don't do it.

Maybe I'll wake up once throughout the night because I still have this habit of like drinking a lot of water before I go to sleep because it's a layover from when I used to be a mouth breather at night and I would be so dehydrated that I would have to just constantly hydrate throughout the night.

So that is our urination segment.

Ladies and gentlemen.

Let's move from urination to erectile tissue.

Talk about erectile tissue in the nose.

That like blew me away.

I had to go back and read that again.

I was like,

Wait,

What?

Nostrils have erectile tissue in them.

So can you speak about that and how that affects us?

Yeah.

So you think when you're writing a book about breathing,

You're going to be researching the lungs,

You know,

Maybe red blood cells,

The different functions of breathing on the brain.

You don't think you're going to be spending months and months like researching genitalia and how breath affects that.

But that's where the research takes you.

You're just going for the ride,

Right?

You're not going to think where it's going.

And I'm just like,

Oh,

Good God,

Here we go.

So yeah,

We learned in the 1890s,

A German researcher by the name of Kaiser,

Kaiser learned that our noses are covered with the same tissue that covers our genitalia and they react the same way.

So they are no nasal tissues engorge with blood,

Right?

And become stiff.

And then they grow flaccid when that blood leaves.

And what's even more fascinating is they do this throughout the day.

One nostril will engorge with blood and be slightly constricted and the other one will open up almost like flowers.

I mentioned the book like one opens and the other closes every 30 minutes to around three or four hours right now.

Okay.

This one's a little more clogged than,

Than my right nostril.

And sometimes they're both open for a little bit and then one will go up and one will go down.

It's a trip,

Right?

So,

So I asked myself,

I was like,

Why on earth would our bodies evolve this ability to do this?

Everyone's noses do this from the day we're born to the day we die.

And it turns out that breathing air through these different channels affects our physiology.

It actually affects our heart rate,

Our blood pressure,

Even our brain function.

And what a miraculous and amazing thing that our bodies are just naturally doing this throughout the day,

Hypothetically or theoretically to help balance ourselves throughout the day.

Right.

And we can hack this through alternate nostril breathing.

I'm sure you guys are familiar with,

But the fact that we're,

We're,

We're naturally imbued with this ability,

I thought was just so cool.

Yeah.

Well,

One of our listeners said,

I understand Eskimo kissing better.

So I thought that was so,

There you go.

Yeah.

I haven't heard that phrase in a while,

But there it is.

A little sword fight.

I don't know.

Someone else mentioned Pinocchio has a new meeting and I'll just soak in with you guys.

That was not my phrase.

I love it.

It's something to think about when you go to sleep at night with,

With that tape on your mouth,

You know,

In the weighted blanket.

All right,

Well,

I know you want to talk about CO2 man.

I've been kind of hogging the mic.

I do.

Actually,

Before we go there,

I think I just want to,

You know,

To keep coming back to the mouth and cause we want to talk about chewing as well as amounts just kind of bringing in here,

You know,

Cause I actually grew up with a you know,

Very hot raised palette.

I had four teeth removed,

Put braces on like,

You know,

All the things you talked about in the book,

You've,

You've experienced the same things.

Like why is soft food,

Which kind of leads the mouth breathing?

Like why is it so destructive for our health?

Yeah.

So this was something that was I had a pretty rude awakening over because I was just like you.

I grew up,

You know,

My mom breastfed me for six months.

She's like,

That was really good back then.

You know,

People just weren't doing it.

And I'm not pointing fingers or blaming any,

I want to be very clear.

You know,

Moms did what they could do.

And you know,

Three kids,

How do you possibly keep up with that?

So starting with that and then,

You know,

Weaned onto soft food,

Gerber,

Applesauce,

Crap,

Just like everyone else was eating.

And then the typical American diet,

Canned vegetables,

Wonder Bread,

Velveeta,

Just everything was soft,

Not only nutritionally deficient,

But,

But soft,

Even though this is what our governments were telling us to eat,

Right?

This was the food pyramid.

Eat a lot of processed grains,

Everybody,

You know,

More count chocula.

It's part of a balanced breakfast.

Exactly what's going on here.

So when we don't get that exercise in our musculature,

In our skeleton,

Our faces don't develop properly.

It's just like anything else,

Right?

It needs input.

Our faces need input.

And what happens is that upper palate of the mouth tends to grow up instead of out.

It's so fascinating when you look at ancient skulls,

Every single one of them have a very wide palate,

Right?

That's flat on top.

And because they have this wide and flat and,

And pronathic facial growth,

Their teeth are all perfect.

If you look at us today,

90% of us have some sort of crookedness in our teeth,

Right?

And the majority of us have a palate that grows up.

And when that palate grows up,

The mouth grows too narrow.

I'm a great example of this.

The teeth grow in crooked.

So what do we smart humans do to fix this?

Instead of widening the mouth,

Instead of fixing the core problem,

We remove teeth in an already too small mouth and then get braces and headgear to take those remaining teeth and to crane them back into our faces.

So you make a small mouth smaller and you make a small airway smaller,

And you don't do anything to fix that upper palate,

Which grows up,

Which can occlude the nasal passages and make it harder to breathe through the nose.

So guess what happens?

You breathe through the mouth with a smaller airway.

So yeah,

If that's not depressing enough,

And if you don't believe me with any of this stuff,

Look at ancient skulls.

Look at any other animal in the wild.

Look at our ancestors,

200,

300,

400 years ago,

They had straight teeth.

They had wide mouth.

They had wider airways.

So this stuff sounds crazy until you measure it,

Until you talk to the scientists,

Which is what I did.

You go under the catacombs in Paris and do the Da Vinci Code.

You also spoke in the book about,

I'm sorry,

Go ahead,

James.

No,

No,

Please,

Please.

No,

You spoke in the book about actually an American explorer who traveled further than,

Or more than Lewis and Clark,

Who went into these ancient or these old native tribes and they were just like these big burly,

Like six feet tall,

Perfect teeth,

Broad noses,

You know,

Broad faces.

And they were just like no history of illness in there or anything like that,

Which I thought was like,

Wow.

And they actually,

They used to,

At the infant,

They used to deliberately close their mouth at night and to only have them breathe through the nose.

So they started at a very young age with these practices.

And here they are like growing up for these like giant beastly kind of men,

The way you describe it in the book,

Are like just big,

Broad people,

Which is just fascinating.

So this was George Catlin,

Who I thought was so fascinating because a lot of us understand Native American cultures after we had already gone in there and given them,

You know,

Different foods and blankets and guns and all of that.

But very few people went in to these cultures before they were essentially colonized and eradicated.

But George Catlin did.

And he spent years living with 50 different tribes for years and years and found that there were some tribes and still to this year,

To this age right now,

They're understood to be the tallest people,

Tallest homo sapiens that have ever lived.

So seven feet tall,

They're seven feet tall,

Universally straight teeth.

We can see this from their skulls.

And they did not suffer from this rash of chronic illnesses that the vast majority of modern humans suffer from.

We know that because we can look at their bones.

We can take different assays and actually look at what they suffered from and what they didn't.

And there are so many paleoanthropologists that do this work.

And they celebrated breathing as a medicine,

Especially nasal breathing,

So much so that it started at birth.

So whenever a kid was done breastfeeding,

The mother would slightly and very gently close its mouth.

At night,

They would watch the kid to make sure he wasn't mouth breathing.

They would even,

Don't do this at home,

A newborn,

They would put an infant on a plank and they would strap them to a plank at night.

They believed this would help their posture.

And it also made it much harder to mouth breathe this way.

You can say what you want about these methods,

But then you look at these people and their systems of health that they had for thousands and thousands of years before we came around and completely decimated them.

And you wonder what other technologies did they know about that we don't.

It's just so ironic that after we did all of that,

Now we're turning to them as models of health.

Like,

Okay,

We need to relearn what you all did because we've messed things up so bad here.

Yeah.

Wow.

We have a way of doing that.

I know we definitely do.

Well,

Speaking of technology,

That we have this internal technology called carbon dioxide,

Which is,

I feel it's been like,

Reading this book and having taught yoga and breathing for like 10 years now and always being like curious about carbon dioxide,

But always like all the teachings and they always talk about oxygen.

So I'm going to quote from the book here.

Everyone talks,

This is quoting Anders Olsson.

Everyone always talks about oxygen.

Olsson told me during our interview in Stockholm,

Whether we breathe 30 times or 50 times a minute a healthy body will always have enough oxygen.

What our bodies really want,

What they require to function properly isn't faster or deeper breaths,

It's not more air.

What we need is more carbon dioxide.

I'm going to go a little further.

You also talk about how O2 bars are absolute bullshit at the airport,

Which I thought was kind of fun,

Right?

50 bucks a pop,

Total bullshit.

And then in here,

You go deeper into the science.

And this is with Yondel Henderson.

And he says,

Carbon dioxide is the chief hormone of the entire body.

It is the only one that is produced in every tissue and that probably acts in every organ,

Henderson later writes or later wrote.

Carbon dioxide is,

In fact,

A more fundamental component of living matter than is oxygen,

Which that kind of really blew my mind.

So let's go down the rabbit hole of carbon dioxide.

And what are some of the findings that you,

I think the chemo receptors in our brain and holding breaths and having a combination of oxygen and carbon dioxide cocktails and stuff like that.

So I was like,

Wow.

Yeah.

So this was something that I was always taught in yoga classes or whatever.

Everyone kept saying,

Get more oxygen and take a deep breath.

And it seems to make sense.

Like the more you breathe,

The more oxygen you should be getting into your body.

But when you start really looking at the biochemistry of how oxygen is delivered until you start really looking at the science,

You find that that's a narrow view.

So to be clear,

When Yandel Henderson is talking about carbon dioxide being very important,

He isn't saying oxygen is unimportant,

Right?

Right.

He's saying these two things need to work together.

And we've been so focused on oxygen to our detriment because we need a balance of CO2 and oxygen at the same time to really get the most health benefits.

So CO2 is one of those things that so many of us view as a negative thing because we keep hearing about CO2 in the atmosphere.

Yeah.

Climate change is real.

There's too much CO2,

But we need that balance in our bodies.

And to me,

What was the most fascinating about this is this was not new science,

Right?

It was new to me.

It was new to everyone I was talking to.

But Yandel Henderson was doing these studies in like the 1910s.

And before him,

They were doing studies into CO2 and the importance of CO2 for oxygen delivery,

You know,

Even before that,

10,

20 years before that.

So this is stuff we've known for 100,

120 years.

And yet you still hear and see people saying it's all about breathing more to get oxygen.

You still see oxygen bars all over the place.

I've not made friends with the oxygen bars.

But as I told them,

I said,

Listen,

I'm not the one doing this research.

Go talk to all the scientists.

Go look at these studies from 100 years ago and you can clearly see what's going on here.

So I'm just the messenger here for better or for worse.

Well,

Let's go a little deeper.

So what you talk about in particular,

I think it's Betaco,

He talks about voluntary elimination of deep breathing and actually enhances performance,

Athletic performance that you talk about with swimmers and runners as well.

Why is breathing less is a big quote in the book.

Why is that so incredibly beneficial for performance or athletic performance or just our nature in general?

So this concept of breathing less should really be taken in context of that the vast majority of us are breathing too much.

So what you want to be doing is breathing within your metabolic needs.

That's what efficiency is.

Take in the oxygen you need.

Exhale the CO2 and all the other toxins in our body at peak efficiency.

Why would you want to be over breathing all the time if you're only using part of that oxygen?

You know,

We exhale about 70%,

70,

75% of the oxygen we take in.

So we're only using a very small amount of that oxygen we take in.

When you breathe heavily,

You're using a far less percent of that oxygen.

So if you think of athletic performance,

It's all about efficiency,

Right?

Why would you needlessly be wasting energy doing something when you can do it much more efficiently?

And by operating much more efficiently,

That will mean you can push harder,

You can go for longer,

You can become a better athlete.

And it's interesting to me that so many athletes aren't considering breathing.

This is how we get the majority of our energy from,

Right?

It's from breathing.

It's not from food and water.

It's from our breath.

You don't believe me,

Hold your breath for three minutes and see how much energy you have when you conk out.

So we have to be considering our breathing when we're doing anything,

But especially with athletics.

So what Buteka was trying to do through his exercises is to train people in these very focused exercises to be comfortable with breathing less,

To increase that CO2 and be comfortable with it so that when they're not doing these exercises,

They will naturally be unconsciously breathing less,

Right?

It's like weightlifting.

It's building a habit.

So you should not be doing these Buteka exercises throughout the day,

Just like you shouldn't be at the gym for 12 hours a day.

You do that for a short amount of time.

You reset your body and these exercises,

You can call them whatever you want.

Buteka,

Papworth method,

Pranayama,

Breath holding is an essential part of any Pranayama.

Call it whatever you want.

It's all doing the same thing.

And they are so transformative to people's health.

The science on that is so clear.

And I can't tell you how many people have written me and that I've talked to who have said just getting their breathing in order by breathing less and understanding this concept,

They've either reduced or reversed their asthma.

Same thing with panic and breathing can even affect autoimmune conditions as well.

Well,

You mentioned panic there and one of our watchers put a comment about post-traumatic stress and anxiety.

And you talk a lot about that in the book about the amygdala and the role that the amygdala plays,

But then also the chemo receptors.

Can you talk about what you experienced there?

Sure.

So our chemo receptors are these little receptors that gauge the amount of CO2 and oxygen.

The peripheral chemo receptors are looking at oxygen as well.

But our main driver for CO,

For breathing is CO2,

Is an increase of CO2.

It's not oxygen.

And I gotten this.

So when you hold your breath right now,

If you exhale,

Hold your breath,

That need to breathe your feeling is triggered from an increase of CO2.

And that increase of CO2 is gauged and measured by these chemo receptors.

That's a very simplistic explanation of how it works,

But that's how it works with breathing.

So the concept is that by allowing these chemo receptors to flex more,

To become tolerant of more CO2,

You can fix your breathing and calm yourself.

We know that when there's low CO2 in the body,

You tend to lose circulation in your extremities.

You tend to lose circulation in your brain,

In the blood flow to your brain.

You tend to become more panicked because your body associates breathing like this with an emergency.

So you create this negative feedback loop that you're constantly alerting your body that there's an emergency,

Right?

And this drives people crazy.

It leads them to panic.

It can contribute to many symptoms of PTSD.

So the very first thing you should do is to get control of your breathing.

I don't know if you know Dr.

Andrew Huberman at Stanford.

He's been studying a ton of breathing over the last few years,

But he said,

This is the number one quickest and most profound thing you can do is to get control of your breathing if you have one of these conditions.

And we can understand it from a biochemical standpoint,

Physiological standpoint,

Neurological standpoint,

But all of those things tie together.

This is your driver and the thing you really need to get ahold of.

Nice.

Well,

I know you have a hard stop coming up.

So I want to be conscious of that for you.

I'm done with my questions.

Will anything on your end?

Did you want to wrap up?

Yeah,

I can always ask some questions.

What was some of your biggest revelations from,

I mean,

It seems like there's so many in this book,

But what are some of the biggest moments as you're writing this book?

And being the guinea pig and researching it,

You're just like,

Wow,

Like what were some of the most profound things or experiences that you had while going through this?

This 10 years took you to write this book,

Right?

Yeah,

Well,

10 years from the point at which I really started getting interested in breathing.

So I was not working on this.

It took years and years and years to convince myself then to convince my agent and then to convince my editor and then to put all the pieces of the puzzle together into a proposal that I was like,

I think there's a book here.

I'm not quite sure.

I think there is.

And I had to rewrite that entire proposal.

So that was about five,

Six months of work just went out the window once I started getting much deeper into the story because I could not believe the stuff I was finding.

Like literally I could not believe that they were real and that they checked out and that evolution doesn't work in a straight line of progress,

That our teeth are all messed up because of we haven't been chewing right,

That CO2 was the main driver.

So it wasn't,

I would love to give you a quick answer on that,

But it was too many things.

I kept digging and kept finding stuff.

I got really obsessed when I work on something that's not a eight hours a day situation all night I'm reading about it all day.

I'm writing,

I'm reading,

I'm talking to people and I love it.

It doesn't feel like work because I'm a pretty curious person and I want to figure out what the real core nugget is.

And also I want to try to strip away some layers of bullshit that we've been fed on both sides of the aisle,

You know,

Western medicine,

But also new age medicine and just get to what is really happening.

So it took a while.

So many revisions of this book,

You know,

90% of the book ended up being cut out.

So hopefully I'll do something with that at some other time.

So this book was a complete nightmare,

A complete pain in the ass.

And I was so happy when it was done,

But I've learned so much since it's come out and it's been a lot of fun now working with so many researchers at top institutions on new studies,

On new research.

We're trying to put together a big conference and it's been really exciting.

Yeah.

You seem to be a massive champion for this work now.

I mean,

She wrote the book and then I guess you're kind of turned into seemingly for me,

It's like a central figure.

It's like,

Oh,

Well,

You know,

There's the body of work.

I can,

I'm comfortable explaining this stuff from the perspective of the researchers and other people that have put in the real work.

And I try to make that very clear.

I never want to be an evangelist for anything.

I want to be an effective observer.

So you're not going to see me on stage with a big breathe sign in the back now and say,

Come on,

Breathe everyone.

You know,

When,

When,

When Hopp is the master at that,

That's his specialty.

He's such an amazing dude.

Who's done such amazing stuff.

But if I can be a conduit for all of this research and these studies,

Which are impossible to read,

By the way,

They're really hard to penetrate and,

And to reinterpret that and put it into a language that the rest of us can understand.

Then I see that as being my role.

But again,

I want to be sure that the credit is due to the people who have actually spent so many years in these places.

I'm just the filter for the information.

You know,

I put it together and I've been lucky enough to go and talk about this stuff,

Which even after a year and a few months,

I'm still so excited because I still keep learning new things about it.

Yeah.

And it's shocking to me that it's like 2021 and we're just understanding or just,

I mean,

Just understanding what the breath can do for us and how,

You know,

Like we talked about mouth breathing and chewing and soft food.

And it's like,

I really feel that there's a much brighter future for us.

I hope so.

And thank you so much for putting this book out.

This has really been a huge revelation for myself and John.

And I think our audience is blowing up here saying like,

Oh my God,

Oh my God,

Oh my God,

I can't believe that.

So it's impressive.

Yeah,

For sure.

And,

And the way that you wrapped up the book and I forget whose quote it was.

But you basically just said,

Shut your mouth.

That was the biggest lesson that we can all take from,

From the book is if we shut our mouth more,

We'll probably be healthier and happier.

So James,

Again,

Thanks so much for coming on the show before I get into the final grounding practice,

How that's how we end the show as well.

How can people best find you?

I mean,

Obviously they can look up the book.

I've seen a lot of people say they've ordered it just since being on the show.

What's what's the best way for people to get ahold of you if they have questions directly for you?

It's hard to get directly ahold of me,

But I try to post things on on Instagram.

I'm old.

So that's been a bit of a challenge.

Who does that now?

Mr.

James Nestor,

Mr.

James Nestor.

And trying to do the Facebook thing as well.

I'm not a huge fan of social media.

So So again,

I'm not posting all the time,

But I'm just posting stuff that has to do with with my research with breathing with other subjects that that might help people and be of interest.

I'm also my website,

My publisher allowed me to publish my entire bibliography for free on the website.

So there's about 400 scientific references with some videos and some data because I know a lot of this stuff where you can fix scoliosis with breathing.

This is this guy's a quack.

Go check out the bibliography.

Check out the scientific studies and the pictures.

And I also have been doing interviews with leaders in the field and posting those for free on my website as well.

It's Mr.

James Nestor dot com backslash breath will take you into that channel.

The UX there is not too pretty.

Everybody I'm getting a little harangued by people,

But but screw it.

That's that's not what I do.

The the information is there and it's and it's free and maybe someday I'll have it redesigned,

But I've been a little busy.

There you go.

And and the bibliography in this book,

It's like 45 pages that that in and of itself was interesting to read.

And I saw some people asking,

Where do you find these studies?

Well check out the bibliography.

Sorry for that.

I have to say one thing about that is I knew no one was going to believe this stuff unless the studies were there and the science was there and the numbers were there.

I didn't believe it either.

And so I had to really convince my publisher.

They're like,

This is absurd,

Dude.

This thing is 45 pages.

I said it has to go in.

Otherwise it just seems so sketchy.

So that's why that's there.

You can choose to read it or not,

But it's there if you want.

And I repeated it on the website with additional studies.

Yeah,

It's it's it's it's really smart,

You know,

Because it's like you said,

It's just it is you read the book.

You're like,

This is unbelievable.

No way.

No way.

It's like 45 pages of scientific reference and big biography.

It's like,

Oh,

My God,

You know,

Most of it's about urination.

It's almost all about urination and erectile erections,

Everybody.

You'll be nice to know that.

All right.

Well,

Again,

James,

Pleasure having you.

We'll just based on time,

I think we'll just do another five second in five second out breath,

Breath,

Much like you talk about in the book.

And you also talk about how that's tied to prayer and chanting and so much of the prayer and chanting is five and a half seconds out,

Five and a half seconds back.

So let's do it.

I'm still pumped up from this show.

Can you guys tell?

All right.

So let's go ahead and exhale as much as we can.

And then in for five seconds.

And out for five,

Four,

Three,

Two,

One,

In for five.

Out for five,

Four,

Three,

Two,

One,

In for five.

Out for five,

Four,

Three,

Two,

One,

Last one,

In for five.

And out for five,

Four,

Three,

Two,

One.

And that is a wrap.

James,

Thank you so much,

My friend.

This was fantastic educational eye opening and we sincerely appreciate you and everything that you've been doing.

Thanks a lot for having me.

Goodbye.

Thank you,

James.

Wonderful.

Yeah.

Thank you so much,

James.

Be well,

Brother.

Thank you for doing this.

If you want to hang tight for about three seconds after the final thing here,

We'll just do that.

All right.

Thanks for coming everybody.

Change the graphics.

There it is.

Thanks for joining Will and John on Men Talking Mindfulness.

If you enjoyed the show,

Please like and share it with your friends and family.

And please,

We would appreciate a review too.

Until next time,

This has been Men Talking Mindfulness.

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Reviews

Excellent, loved Breath by James Nestor. Great to hear the men talking & laughing & having great banter. An uplifting experience 💚✨