This book improved my life. I’d put it up there with The Power of Habits, Religion for Atheists, Spark, and The Power of Now. Seems like “The Power of” is a book titling hack.
Breath’s message is simple: Mouth breathing is seriously bad for you. Stop doing it. Instead, breath slowly and steadily through your nose. Take deep exhales.
Many of our modern health problems – from poor sleep, to panic attacks, to anxiety – could be caused by, or at the very least are made worse by, bad breathing habits.
Oh, and chew gum. Work those mouth muscles.
Though we hear many of the same messages from yoga teachers and health gurus, Breath has convinced me to take it seriously, because science.
ymmv but I hope you take away something too
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BREATH BY JAMES NESTOR
When the nasal cavity gets congested, airflow decreases and bacteria flourish. These bacteria replicate and can lead to infections and colds and more congestion. Congestion begets congestion, which gives us no other option but to habitually breathe from the mouth.
Oxygen, it turned out, produced 16 times more energy than carbon dioxide. Aerobic life forms used this boost to evolve,
Instead, we’re adopting and passing down traits that are detrimental to our health. This concept, called dysevolution, was made popular by Harvard biologist Daniel Lieberman, and it explains why our backs ache, feet hurt, and bones are growing more brittle. Dysevolution also helps explain why we’re breathing so poorly.
Simply training yourself to breathe through your nose could cut total exertion in half and offer huge gains in endurance. The athletes felt invigorated while nasal breathing rather than exhausted. They all swore off breathing through their mouths ever again.
Inhaling from the nose has the opposite effect. It forces air against all those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and breathing easier. After a while, these tissues and muscles get “toned” to stay in this opened and wide position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal breathing.
Every morning Olsson and I would listen to recordings of ourselves sleeping the night before. We laughed at first, then we got a bit frightened: what we heard weren’t the sounds of happy Dickensian drunks, but of men being strangled to death by our own bodies.
I’d read a report from the Mayo Clinic which found that chronic insomnia, long assumed to be a psychological problem, is often a breathing problem. The millions of Americans who have a chronic insomnia disorder and who are, right now, like me, staring out bedroom windows, or at TVs, phones, or ceilings, can’t sleep because they can’t breathe.
The ancient Chinese were onto it as well. “The breath inhaled through the mouth is called ‘Ni Ch’i, adverse breath,’ which is extremely harmful,” states a passage from the Tao. “Be careful not to have the breath inhaled through the mouth.”
Harvold’s monkeys recovered, too. After two years of forced mouthbreathing, he removed the silicone plugs. Slowly, surely, the animals relearned how to breathe through their noses. And slowly, surely, their faces and airways remodeled: jaws moved forward and facial structure and airways morphed back into their wide and natural state.
scientists have known for more than a century that the nostrils do pulse to their own beat, that they do open and close like flowers throughout the day and night.
The interior of the nose, it turned out, is blanketed with erectile tissue, the same flesh that covers the penis, clitoris, and nipples. Noses get erections. Within seconds, they too can engorge with blood and become large and stiff. This happens because the nose is more intimately connected to the genitals than any other organ;
The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase.
Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect: it works as a kind of brake system to the right nostril’s accelerator. The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety.
The volume the ball would take up, some six cubic inches, is equivalent to the total space of all the cavities and passageways that make up the interior of the adult nose.
the mucus is the body’s “first line of defense.” It’s constantly on the move, sweeping along at a rate of about half an inch every minute, more than 60 feet per day. Like a giant conveyor belt, it collects inhaled debris in the nose, then moves all the junk down the throat and into the stomach, where it’s sterilized by stomach acid, delivered to the intestines, and sent out of your body.
The tribes attributed their vigorous health to a medicine, what Catlin called the “great secret of life.” The secret was breathing.
Catlin described how adult tribal members would even resist smiling with an open mouth, fearing some noxious air might get in. This practice was as “old and unchangeable as their hills,” he wrote, and it was shared universally throughout the tribes for millennia.
He told me that mouthbreathing contributed to periodontal disease and bad breath, and was the number one cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene.
“The health benefits of nose breathing are undeniable,” he told me. One of the many benefits is that the sinuses release a huge boost of nitric oxide, a molecule that plays an essential role in increasing circulation and delivering oxygen into cells. Immune function, weight, circulation, mood, and sexual function can all be heavily influenced by the amount of nitric oxide in the body. (The popular erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil, known by the commercial name Viagra, works by releasing nitric oxide into the bloodstream, which opens the capillaries in the genitals and elsewhere.) Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of the reasons we can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen than by just breathing through the mouth.
They gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity.
“What the bodily form depends on is breath (chi) and what breath relies upon is form,” states a Chinese adage from 700 AD. “When the breath is perfect, the form is perfect (too).”
And what powers the thoracic pump is the diaphragm, the muscle that sits beneath the lungs in the shape of an umbrella. The diaphragm lifts during exhalations, which shrinks the lungs, then it drops back down to expand them during inhalations. This up-and-down movement occurs within us some 50,000 times a day.
That carbon dioxide in every exhale has weight, and we exhale more weight than we inhale. And the way the body loses weight isn’t through profusely sweating or “burning it off.” We lose weight through exhaled breath. For every ten pounds of fat lost in our bodies, eight and a half pounds of it comes out through the lungs; most of it is carbon dioxide mixed with a bit of water vapor. The rest is sweated or urinated out. This is a fact that most doctors, nutritionists, and other medical professionals have historically gotten wrong. The lungs are the weight-regulating system of the body.
“Carbon dioxide is the chief hormone of the entire body; it is the only one that is produced by every tissue and that probably acts on every organ”
It turns out that when breathing at a normal rate, our lungs will absorb only about a quarter of the available oxygen in the air. The majority of that oxygen is exhaled back out. By taking longer breaths, we allow our lungs to soak up more in fewer breaths. “If, with training and patience, you can perform the same exercise workload with only 14 breaths per minute instead of 47 using conventional techniques, what reason could there be not to do it?” wrote John Douillard, the trainer who’d conducted the stationary bike experiments in the 1990s. “When you see yourself running faster every day, with your breath rate stable . . . you will begin to feel the true meaning of the word fitness.” I realized then that breathing was like rowing a boat: taking a zillion short and stilted strokes will get you where you’re going, but they pale in comparison to the efficiency and speed of fewer, longer strokes.
Slower, longer exhales, of course, mean higher carbon dioxide levels. With that bonus carbon dioxide, we gain a higher aerobic endurance.
He’d become convinced that breathing too much was the culprit behind several chronic diseases. Like Bohr and Henderson, Buteyko was fascinated with carbon dioxide, and he too believed that increasing this gas by breathing less could not only keep us fit and healthy. It could heal us as well.
The healthiest patients breathed alike, too: less. They’d inhale and exhale about ten times a minute, taking in a total of about five to six liters of air. Their resting pulses ranged from around 48 to 55, and they had about 50 percent more carbon dioxide in their exhaled breath.
Competitive swimmers usually take two or three strokes before they flip their heads to the side and inhale. Counsilman trained his team to hold their breath for as many as nine strokes. He believed that, over time, the swimmers would utilize oxygen more efficiently and swim faster.
Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere.
But asthma can be brought on by overbreathing, which is why it’s so common during physical exertion, a condition called exercise-induced asthma that affects around 15 percent of the population and up to 40 percent of athletes.
“The yogi’s life is not measured by the number of his days, but the number of his breaths”
Societies that replaced their traditional diet with modern, processed foods suffered up to ten times more cavities, severely crooked teeth, obstructed airways, and overall poorer health. The modern diets were the same: white flour, white rice, jams, sweetened juices, canned vegetables, and processed meats. The traditional diets were all different.
Our ancient ancestors chewed for hours a day, every day. And because they chewed so much, their mouths, teeth, throats, and faces grew to be wide and strong and pronounced. Food in industrialized societies was so processed that it hardly required any chewing at all.
Weight lifters frequently deal with sleep apnea and chronic breathing problems; instead of layers of fat, they have muscles crowding the airways. Plenty of rail-thin distance runners and even infants suffer, too.
By day, we unconsciously attempt to open our obstructed airways by sloping our shoulders, craning our necks forward, and tilting our heads up.
“You, me, whoever—we can grow bone at any age,” Belfor told me. All we need are stem cells. And the way we produce and signal stem cells to build more maxilla bone in the face is by engaging the masseter—by clamping down on the back molars over and over. Chewing.
Until a few hundred years ago, mothers would breastfeed infants up to two to four years of age, and sometimes to adolescence. The more time infants spent chewing and sucking, the more developed their faces and airways would become, and the better they’d breathe later in life.
The deeper and more softly we breathe in, and the longer we exhale, the more slowly the heart beats and the calmer we become.
It’s also especially useful for middle-aged people who suffer from lower-grade stress, aches and pains, and slowing metabolisms. For them—for me—Tummo can be a preventative therapy, a way to get a fraying nervous system back on track and keep it there.
Here’s the information: To practice Wim Hof’s breathing method, start by finding a quiet place and lying flat on your back with a pillow under your head. Relax the shoulders, chest, and legs. Take a very deep breath into the pit of your stomach and let it back out just as quickly. Keep breathing this way for 30 cycles. If possible, breathe through the nose; if the nose feels obstructed, try pursed lips. Each breath should look like a wave, with the inhale inflating the stomach, then the chest. You should exhale all the air out in the same order. At the end of 30 breaths, exhale to the natural conclusion, leaving about a quarter of the air left in the lungs, then hold that breath for as long as possible. Once you’ve reached your breathhold limit, take one huge inhale and hold it another 15 seconds. Very gently, move that fresh breath of air around the chest and to the shoulders, then exhale and start the heavy breathing again. Repeat the whole pattern three or four rounds and add in some cold exposure (cold shower, ice bath, naked snow angels) a few times a week.
Willingly breathing to the point of exhaustion, they found, could place patients in a state of stress where they could access subconscious and unconscious thoughts. Essentially, the therapy helped people blow a fuse in their minds so they could return to a state of groovy calm.
Whenever the body is forced to take in more air than it needs, we’ll exhale too much carbon dioxide, which will narrow the blood vessels and decrease circulation, especially in the brain. With just a few minutes, or even seconds, of overbreathing, brain blood flow can decrease by 40 percent, an incredible amount.
If we keep breathing a little faster and deeper, more blood will drain from the brain, and the visual and auditory hallucinations will become more profound.
The textbooks were wrong. The amygdalae were not the only “alarm circuit of fear.” There was another, deeper circuit in our bodies that was generating perhaps a more powerful sense of danger than anything the amygdalae alone could muster.
All this suggests that for the past hundred years psychologists may have been treating chronic fears, and all the anxieties that come with them, in the wrong way. Fears weren’t just a mental problem, and they couldn’t be treated by simply getting patients to think differently. Fears and anxiety had a physical manifestation, too. They could be generated from outside the amygdalae, from within a more ancient part of the reptilian brain.
Those with the worst anxieties consistently suffer from the worst breathing habits.
People with anorexia or panic or obsessive-compulsive disorders consistently have low carbon dioxide levels and a much greater fear of holding their breath. To avoid another attack, they breathe far too much and eventually become hypersensitized to carbon dioxide and panic if they sense a rise in this gas.
Tissues will begin “rusting” in much the same way as other materials. But we don’t call this “tissue rust.” We call it cancer. And this helps explain why cancers develop and thrive in environments of low oxygen.
Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity.
There is no mention in the Yoga Sutras of moving between or even repeating poses. The Sanskrit word asana originally meant “seat” and “posture.” It referred both to the act of sitting and the material you sit on. What it specifically did not mean was to stand up and move about. The earliest yoga was a science of holding still and building prana through breathing.
Robert Corruccini has called them, “diseases of civilization.” Nine out of ten of the top killers, such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke are caused by the food we eat, water we drink, houses we live in, and offices we work in. They are diseases humanity created.
From what I’ve learned in the past decade, that 30 pounds of air that passes through our lungs every day and that 1.7 pounds of oxygen our cells consume is as important as what we eat or how much we exercise. Breathing is a missing pillar of health.
“If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe better,” wrote Andrew Weil, the famed doctor.
As basic as this sounds, full exhalations are seldom practiced. Most of us engage only a small fraction of our total lung capacity with each breath, requiring us to do more and get less. One of the first steps in healthy breathing is to extend these breaths, to move the diaphragm up and down a bit more, and to get air out of us before taking a new one in.
The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air.
Sanya Richards-Ross, a Jamaican-American sprinter, used Buteyko’s techniques to win three Olympic golds in the 4×400 meter relay (in 2004, 2008, and 2012) and gold in the 400 meters in 2012. She was ranked as the top 400-meter runner in the world for a decade. Photos of Richards-Ross with her mouth closed
Hard, natural foods and chewing gum likely work just as effectively. Marianna Evans recommends her patients chew gum for a couple of hours a day. I too followed this advice and some days I would chomp on an extremely hard type of Turkish gum called Falim, which came in flavors like carbonate and mint grass. The stuff tasted pretty crude, but it offered a workout and delivered results.