I was gasping for air.
Still lying on the floor, I was too lightheaded to stand.
I kept thinking, I am the pilot not the passenger.
It was little over a month before this moment when I began to believe just how important how we breathe is to our moment to moment wellbeing and our overall longevity.
I had just finished reading Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor, and the tldr; is mouth breathing is horrible for nearly every aspect of your existence.
The goal is nose breathing for everything including exercise.
Mouth breathing leads to poor sleep, often to sleep apnea. It leaves you 40% more dehydrated. It makes you dumber since it takes twice as long for the air to reach your brain, reducing brain cell development. It’s less efficient with more dirty air in your body.
The result is smaller, more infection prone lungs.
In a time with COVID-19 all around us attacking our respiratory tracts and fires filling the air with noxious smoke over much of the West Coast, the preciousness of breathing has come front and center.
Nestor sums it up in his book introduction:
"The nose is the silent warrior: the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our minds, and weather vane to our emotions."
Breath work
After several minutes, I was still on the floor, and my hands were tingling. I was participating in a live zoom with breath coach Chuck McGee III and the source of the message in my head, I am the pilot not the passenger.
McGee is a certified Wim Hof Method Instructor and had shown Nestor the technique during a group breath work session in San Francisco. While I was on my apartment floor on my yoga mat, he took a group through the same breath work as he did with Nestor.
After some regular breathing through the nose and filling the stomach so the diaphragm lifts, massaging our gut organs clearing out any toxins, I filled my lungs and exhaled through the nose.
Then he started to countdown: “5 more breaths, 4, 3, 2 and on the next breath, exhale and hold your exhaled breath.”
I wasn't able to make it to his next instruction. That's when I gasped for air, or actually released the carbon dioxide. A few moments later, he instructed everyone to take in a deep breath and hold this one too. Holding it felt really good as there was a rush to my head.
We repeated this three more times. He encouraged making a sound on the exhale or even stretch.
"Expression is the opposite of depression."
By the third round inhale, my jaw relaxed and the rush of oxygen cleared my mind. My body was vibrating and tingling from the change in blood pressure.
"This is not something happening to you, but something you are doing for yourself," he said.
By the fourth time, I pushed the inhale with some pressure to the base of my neck. My jaw relaxed even more and my mind felt even more clear and present. My hips also opened up and relaxed.
With this technique, you are training to become more comfortable with the carbon dioxide in the body, McGee told us.
Turns out what makes us need to breathe isn't oxygen, but the carbon dioxide. Slower, longer exhales, result in higher carbon dioxide levels. This increases VO2 max, which can boost athletic stamina & also help us have a longer healthspan.
Chemoreceptors at the base of the brain stem use carbon dioxide to determine how fast and often we breath, not the amount of oxygen. At our earliest evolutionary state, our cells were dealing with a carbon dioxide rich environment on the planet. From the very earliest of our evolutionary being, it was this exchange between the carbon dioxide environment and the limited oxygen that began our breathing.
If you can train yourself to better manage your carbon dioxide levels and develop more flexible chemoreceptors, you can reduce anxiety, increase lung capacity and improve your overall health, according to Nestor.
How do you do this? Holding your breath on the exhale when your body is filled with carbon dioxide. This Wim Hof method of breath work can help.
Heavy breathing practices including the Wim Hof technique also results in increased energy, releasing immune cells to heal wounds, fight off pathogens and infection.
"So by practicing this breath work, by taking the ice baths, you can increase how well your immune system works," McGee told me when I asked him about the technique after the 20 min breath work session. "But you are in fact bringing it down momentarily, and you are using a hermetic stress to make yourself stronger."
This breath work increases the size of your lungs. The size of your lungs are directly tied to your life span. Nestor learned that throughout history people with smaller and less efficient lungs got sick and died over those with larger lungs. This feels so relevant and important in today’s world.
Moderate exercise like walking or cycling can boost lung size by 15%, according to Nestor. He also said in a recent podcast he breathes through his nose for all his athletic endeavors.
While I am mostly a nose breather thankfully, when I'm exercising, my default is to breath through the mouth. The experts he talked to recommend slowing down until you can workout by nose breathing. This will increase your lung size, carbon dioxide tolerance, and athletic endurance.
Within 6 months of training to breathe through the nose, you'll need 20% less oxygen, according to McGee.
Nervous system
Breathing through the nose is the gateway to controlling your autonomic nervous system. This is an automatic system you can actually control through how you breathe. It’s a key to how you can manage stress and anxiety.
"The tens of billions of molecules we bring into our bodies with every breath also serve a more subtle, but equally important role," Nestor writes. "They influence nearly every internal organ, telling them when to turn on and off. They affect heart rate, digestion, moods, attitudes; when we feel aroused, and when we feel nauseated. Breathing is a power switch to a vast network called the autonomic nervous system."
Left nostril breathing drives relaxation through your parasympathetic nervous system, lowering your body temperature & blood pressure. It shifts blood flow to the right side of your brain that impacts creative thought, emotions, formation of mental abstractions, and negative emotions.
Want more focus and energy? Breathe through your right nostril to stimulate your sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” where your body goes into an elevated state of awareness. It sends blood to the side of the brain for logical decisions, language, and computing.
If you recall, Hillary Clinton famously talked about the left and right nasal breathing technique to help manage the stress of the campaign. “It’s very relaxing.” she said to CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I find it very helpful.”
In contrast, the Wim Hof method of breathing is putting you in stress mode by activating the sympathetic nervous system to build lung size just as you stress muscle fiber to build muscles when working out.
Chewing
Our lack of chewing has led to smaller jaws which impacts the nasal pathways. Smaller nasal pathways lead to more horrible mouth breathing.
A combination of processed foods, bad dental solutions and evolution have made nose breathing more difficult. Soft foods led to less chewing which in turn led to smaller mouths. Over time faces started to grow differently leaving less room for the nose to work properly. Well intentioned dentists tried to solve the problem with various, sometimes barbaric solutions over the past 200 years, but likely made it worse.
The resulting mouth breathing habit gives way to snoring and at its worst, sleep apnea. Like any part of your body, the less its used the less strength it has. The proper respiratory pathways become weaker with mouth breathing.
Horrible mouth breathing begets more horrible mouth breathing.
While one of the solutions to help break the mouth breathing habit at night and strengthen those respiratory parts of the body is literally taping your mouth shut, another solution is to chew more.
Unlike the rest of your body, you can create new bones in your face, no matter your age, by releasing new stem cells by chewing. It also has the added benefit of helping you look younger, which is always nice.
"The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe," Nestor writes.
Breathe Less
"Most of us engage only a small fraction of our total lung capacity with each breath, requiring us to do more and get less," Nestor writes. "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."
When you're in a heightened state and the sympathetic nervous system is activated, you breathe quicker and less efficient. The problem in our always now, instant feedback, data streaming modern world is we are rarely out of the sympathetic mode.
"Up to 80 percent of office workers (according to one estimate) suffer from something called continuous partial attention," Nestor writes. "We’ll scan our email, write something down, check Twitter, and do it all over again, never really focusing on any specific task. In this state of perpetual distraction, breathing becomes shallow and erratic."
As a result, we have to be more intentional about accessing our parasympathetic mode.
This is done by manipulating the tone of the vagus nerve. "The vagus nerve is the power lever; it’s what turns organs on and off in response to stress."
"You can’t just will yourself to calm down or stimulate the vagus nerve," Stanford Dept of Neurobiology's Andrew Huberman, MD told me at a conference earlier this year. He suggested a double inhale to get rid of carbon dioxide as the best way to reset and calm down.
This is why breathing was seen as medication. The Chinese called their system of conscious breathing qigong: qi, meaning “breath,” and gong, meaning “work,” or, put together, breathwork. Hindu's knew it as prana, which translates to “life force” or “vital energy.” "Prana is, basically, an ancient theory of atoms."
The more prana something has, the more alive it is. When we breathe, we expand our life force.
After a few moments of quiet breathing, I was able to stand up from the yoga mat after the breath work session, feeling slightly lightheaded but overall really energized, my vagus nerve fully alive.
"We are the alchemist," McGee said during the final breath work sequence. "We can affect deep change within."
Advice
Nestor breaks down what we should do into six main points:
Shut your MOUTH: mouth breathing is horrible for your health and lifespan.
EXHALE: Breath with slow exhalation.
CHEW: Build new bone in your face and open up the nasal passage be releasing stem cells through chewing.
BREATHE MORE, ON OCCASION: Exercise with techniques such as the Wim Hof method or with a cardio workout with only nose breathing.
HOLD YOUR BREATH: Condition your body to handle more carbon dioxide as I was doing with the Wim Hof method.
HOW WE BREATHE MATTERS: 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.
“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.
When a wave comes, it washes over you and runs up the beach. Then, the wave turns around, and recedes over you, going back to the ocean. . . . This is like the breath, which exhales, transitions, inhales, transitions, and then starts the process again. -Yoga Sutra 2.51
Resources:
Wim Hof Method Instructor Chuck McGee III offers free live group breathing sessions via zoom on Sundays at 11am PT and Monday’s at 9pm PT. One of the nice things is he’ll send you the recording of the breathing session after so you can do it again on your own. Here’s a link to his Meetup page to learn more.
As you can imaging after writing such a book, the author and journalist has become a pretty solid breathing expert himself. He’s compiled some guided videos on his site along with expert advice.
McGee also recommended the Wim Hof app with guided breathing exercises that I’ve tried. It’s available for both iOS and Android.
Google has an app that pops up automatically when the words “breathing exercise” are searched. It trains visitors to inhale and exhale every 5.5 seconds.
A startup called Spire created a device that tracks breath rate and alerts users every time respiration becomes too fast or disjointed.
HeartMath has a solution to help balance your autonomic nervous system.