#638: How Changing Your Breathing Can Change Your Life

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. And we think about improving our health. We typically think about diet trying to exercise more, taking vitamins and supplements. My guess. They argued that none of that stuff really matters. We haven't improved something even more foundational are breathing. His name is James Nestor and his latest book is breath. The new science of a lost art at the beginning of our conversation. James explains why he paid.

Tens of dollars have his nose plugged up and what happened to his body? When he could only breathe out of his mouth. We impact the dangers of the common problem of being a habitual mouth breather. Including the fact that he even changed the shape of our faces and why modern humans started breathing through their mouth and rather than their nose in the first place. James then, reveals what happened? When he switched his experiment around and breathe. Only through his nose and explains why simply switching the passageway of your breathing from oral and nasal can have such significant health benefits. He also shares his weird trick to switch from mouth to know his breathing at night, which I've tried myself and I found effective within this.

The importance of getting better at exhaling and why you counter intuitively. Probably need to be thinking more about getting more carbon dioxide in your body rather than oxygen and the latter part of our conversation. We discuss more advanced breathing techniques, including hypoventilation training where you double your Excel to inhales to acclimate yourself to higher levels of CO2 as well as other experimental breathing techniques. That may allow people to take conscious control of the supposedly involuntary. Autonomic nervous system in order to boost immunity and heal diseases. After shows over check out our show notes at aom is breath.

All right, James, Nestor, welcome back to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. So we

had you on a couple years ago, to talk about your book deep, which is about free divers. And these are people who train themselves to without any Aid of oxygen to just go down as far as they can in the ocean. And they're down there for minutes at a time, your talk about the science of this. While you're researching this book and doing this, you were yourself.

For dealing with some breathing problems. What, what are the type of problems you're struggling with? And what made you think? Well, maybe these freedivers could train themselves to breathe better. Maybe I can do that

too. I had been surfing a lot at Ocean Beach and, you know, exercising a bunch and thought that just chronic bronchitis was just part of the game, because everyone, I knew was having some sort of respiratory problem or or another be it allergies. Asthma bronchitis on occasion. I was getting mild pneumonia.

Via a year after year wasn't any big deal, just take antibiotics and be on with it. And again, I didn't expect that anything was wrong until I saw my doctor and she's like, hey, I think you're not breathing properly and it could be exacerbating or maybe even causing these problems. So she suggested I go to a breathing class and I did that had this very weird experience. Just sitting in the corner of this cold room here in San Francisco breathing, in this rhythmic pattern and

I sweated through my t-shirt. My hair was sopping wet or sweat stains on my jeans. I mean, it was completely wild unlike anything. I had experienced and I thought, wow, something's going on here. I wonder what the science has to say about this. So that was really Beyond freediving where I saw the potential of breathing for underwater research. Also started wondering what breathing could do for the rest of us on land and that's what really set me off.

And it's that you often a new book and went on.

These, all these crazy scientific adventures. And the first one is the craziest because you basically, you paid five thousand dollars to have a doctor plug up your nose. What were you hoping to learn by doing that?

This was never intended? So this was never ever. Part of my plan is funny. People read the book and they think that I had placed myself, you know, in these situations on purpose, but it was through total happenstance. The doctor. He's the

Phrenology research, it's Stanford. So knows everything about the nose, and I had had several interviews with him. Long hours, long interviews, and he kept telling me about all the wondrous things. The nose can do, how it can help fight off, viruses. How It conditions are how it allows us to absorb more oxygen. And he kept also telling me about how bad it was that. So many of us are breathing through our mouths, like something like 25 to 50 percent of us are chronic mouth breathers, and I think I was breathing.

Going through my mouth a lot too because I didn't didn't know the difference. And so I asked him, I said, well how soon there's this damage from mouth-breathing. Come on, that includes neurological problems and includes respiratory problems, poorer athletic performance. All of that and that's been known for a while, but nobody really knew how quickly it came on. And he didn't know. No one had conducted an experiment with it. So I volunteered for an experiment. Of course, Stanford didn't have money for this. This kind of

Research. So we had to Pony up the cash ourselves and and it was even more than five grand. So I used a big chunk of my book advance to to do this because I was curious to see what would happen.

So basically he stuck plugs up your nose and then taped like but you couldn't breathe through your nose. How soon. Did you start noticing changes in your breathing and how it influenced your health?

Yeah. So that was the plan is for 10 days. Silicon up the nose tape over that to inhibit.

In the slightest amount of air entering the nose. So me and one other subject breathing therapist named. Anders Olsen. We were only mouth breathing for 10 days and we were recording what was happening in our brains physiological data. Three times, a day every single day and we found that mouth-breathing. We knew it was bad. We didn't know it was going to be this bad. I mean within a few hours my I mean this is a few hours of switching are breathing. My blood pressure shot up about 20 points that night my

Snoring increased, thirteen, hundred percent within three days. I was snoring through half the night. I hadn't been snoring before doing this and there's the other subject in the experiment suffered the exact same damage. We're stressed fatigued. I mean, you name it. And to me this explained at least partly why so many people are suffering from so many of these chronic problems. It's just switching the pathway of your breathing just breathing through the mouth can really exacerbated.

Bait so many

issues. Alright, so you did this scientific experiment to get data on how bad mouth breathing is for you, but it was something that earlier cultures already knew intuitively. For example, you talk about tribes were the parents would close their baby's lips, their fingers to keep them from breathing with their mouths.

Yeah, you can trace this back. Several thousand years. Actually, in many early, Hindu texts. They were talking about the wonders of nasal breathing, the Chinese wrote seven books.

The Dow dedicated to breathing of all the bad things that can happen when you do it improperly, they specifically mention mouth-breathing, how injurious it is the body and they talk about the wonders of nasal breathing. So this spread out through other cultures. And what was interesting to me is you can find this in cultures, but these cultures didn't have direct contact with one another. So, they all came to the same conclusions, somewhat independently and the Native Americans. That's the story.

You're siding were habitual nasal breathers, and they were so into it that some of them according to the sources would hesitate when they when they laughed because they didn't want to open their mouth for even a moment to get air in. And when they had infants after they were done breastfeeding they would softly close their lips. They stand over them at night to see if they open their mouths while they were sleeping and softly close their lips to make this a habit later.

On in life, to always breathe through the nose.

All right, so if mouth breathing is so bad for you. Why do modern people do it?

Well, I think we've become can, it's become so normal that you look at people running. You look at people in a gym when we used to go to gyms and almost everyone's breathing through their mouth, their thinking that more oxygen is going to get into their bodies, the more they breathe through their mouth, but the opposite is happening. This is such a counter intuitive concept. Took me months to get my head around.

But I had thought it was habitual. I thought it was environmental our noses, get plugged from pollutants or allergies or whatever. We have to breathe through our mouths, but it wasn't until I dug deeper into the story and found it's actually caused by evolution of the human skull that seems nuts. But all you need to do is look at skulls from 400 years ago. And look at scholes now and they've massively changed. Especially in the mouth, our mouths have grown.

So small, our teeth no longer fit, which is why they grow in crooked. The other problem with having a to Smallmouth. You have a smaller Airway, which is the one the main reason. So many of us have sleep apnea snoring, other respiratory issues.

When you actually, you go to like a crypt beneath Paris to look at defined skulls for 400 years ago. I mean, so what would happen? Like, why, why have our mouths gotten smaller over the

years? Yeah. So that was one of the first Expeditions I really did because I wasn't

able to get into Labs. It's hard to get into labs and look at ancient skulls. I had not met the a biological Anthropologist that I later ended up working with. So I wanted to see what happened to to our scholes up close and personal. And I managed to contact a friend of a friend who took me down to the quarry's in Paris, which are about 60 feet below the streets of Paris, 170 miles and their six million human skulls down there. So I was able to Route around and look at skulls down there without anyone.

Looking over my shoulder, you know without any plaques or cautionary ropes completely wild experience. So what I learned later after that was that so much of the damage that's been caused to our mouths to our sinuses, to our ability to breathe is because humans have stopped chewing. If you look at industrialized food processed flour, process, rise can stuff. It's all soft. And without that masticatory.

Stress especially early in life mouths, don't grow properly. They don't grow wide enough, which is the main reason. There's other things that contribute to this, but that's the main reason. So many of us have crooked teeth and that is also correlated to breathing problems.

All right, kind of add some contacts to your people have smaller mouths today because they're they have less exercise chewing on harder food, and that began even before the Industrial Revolution, with industrialized food. It started with the dawn of cooking.

So mi have gotten taller rather than wider and your nasal cavity, your sinuses gets smaller as a result which leads to a preference for mouth breathing and it gets more interesting still because being a mouth breather can actually change the shape of your face too.

Yeah. It's so common that it's, it has a official name. It's called adenoid face. When kids get inflamed adenoids or tonsils. They have to breathe through their mouth and if you do this for so many years.

years, it can actually change the skeleton. Sure of your faith, and it changes how you're going to look, which is later on in life. These people who study this stuff. The scientists can tell if someone has been breathing through their mouth through their youth because of the way in which their face is grown, and what that means is, it's a longer face to droopier face. The chin is recessed. So you don't have this big powerful chin, of course, genes and genetics determine

A lot of how you're going to look but epigenetics these environmental inputs. Also have a huge influence of how you're going to grow and your health including your breathing.

So what happened? You did this experiment 10 days, what it was like to be a chronic mouth breather. What happened when you remove the nasal plugs and could breathe through your nose again.

Yeah. So the experiment was never intended to be like some jackass stunts, you know, we were lolling our bodies into a position, they already knew and that.

That so much of the population already knew that the difference was, we were calculating everything that was happening. So the good part of the experiment was that the next phase was only nasal breathing. I mean, I'm sure We snuck in some mouth breaths here and there, but the vast majority of the breast we were taking per day, including all of those at night, were through the nose. We also practice some breathing techniques along the way and within the first night. My snoring, almost completely disappear.

It went down to about 30 minutes. Three nights later, two nights later. It was gone. I had no sleep, apnea. No snoring. Blood pressure went down about 20 points. 30 points from its highest point the previous week. I mean, just a complete transformation. Our athletic endurance increase. We're measuring that heart rate. Variability went through the roof was so dramatic. And yet, this is such a simple thing to do to breathe through the nose.

And not the mouth and it seems to be completely lost on modern society.

So what is it about nasal breathing? Like you said that you you actually get more oxygen from breathing through our nose than our mouth is that it makes doesn't make sense. You're like well if I'm breathing through mouth, I'm getting more air in what's going on in our knows that allows us to our body to get more oxygen.

Sure. So number of things are happening. First of all, your pressurizing air and you're slowing it down which allows more time for oxygen to soak in.

For gas exchange, in your lungs. If you take a breath through your nose, you get that negative pressure going in that vacuum. Then as you exhale through the nose, you get that positive pressure. So beyond just that and you get 20% more oxygen, equivalent breaths through the nose, then through the mouth, that is enormous, especially throughout the day. So other things are happening with that pressure. You're able to push those soft tissues at the back of the airway, further back and end to help tone.

On them a little more which opens the airway. If you open your mouth right now. I just learned this trick from dr. Steven park at Albert Einstein Medical Center. If you open your mouth right now, you're going to feel your tongue, softly. Going back into your Airway. And as you close your mouth, the tongue is going to gently, move up towards the upper palate. When it moves up towards the upper palate. You're opening your Airway, which is also one of the reasons why nasal breathing is so effective with people with mild or even moderate.

Sometimes even sleep apnea. So beyond that. I mean it's, you know, the nose is the first line of defense. It filters stuff out produces nitric oxide which interacts directly with viruses. There's there's innumerable benefits to nasal breathing and none of that is controversial, right? You asked anyone any Rhine ologist? And they know about this stuff. It's just seldom practiced.

So I mean, it sounds like something I think people typically breathe through their mouths or thinking, well, I got sinus infections, so I can't breathe through my nose, but

It sounds like the mouth breathing could be contributing to like the sinus infection and your inability to breathe through your nose.

Absolutely. It's a use it or lose it thing. And they've, they've found this the doctor of speech language pathology down at Stanford study, people who had had laryngectomy. She's little holes drilled in their throat because I had mouth cancer, some other problem. And from two months, to two years, their noses were 100% blocked. So, zero could get in there. And she found that the more we

Use your nose, the more those tissue, those tissues are going to become acclimated, and open up, and allow us to use our noses. So, with something like chronic sinusitis, which 25% of the population, suffers from this like that is a huge number. You got to find a way of clearing your nose as Nayak down at Stanford said, if your toilets plugged, you're going to find a way of clearing it and the nose has to be considered the same thing.

So I think during out during the day, someone can practice intentionally, practice nose breathing.

But what about at night like and that's the thing with mouth breathing at night. That's one of the things that leads to bad breath, periodontal disease as well. So what do you do? What can you do to? Make sure your mouth shut at

night so so many other issues as well because when you're breathing through the mouth, you don't have all those structures in the nose that help to humidify and filter. And condition are so breathing through the mouth will release 40% more, moisture than breathing through the nose. So I had been a mouth breather at night for as long.

I can remember which is why I would go to bed with a huge glass of water by the bedside every single night. Didn't matter. If I was in a hotel and I just thought this was normal to be waking up with the dry mouth hitting on water, going back to sleep, waking up, hitting on water, going back to sleep. It's not normal. Oh, but you know sleeping with your mouth, open is not a normal thing. You look at animals in the wild. They're not doing it. So what I had learned at Stanford from doctor and Kearney and also from dr. Mark,

/ Hani is that we can use a teeny piece of tape. Now. I'm not talking about a fat strip of industrial tape or duct tape or anything. A teeny piece about the size of a postage stamp. You place that at the center of your lips and the point of this isn't to block are from the mouth. It's just to train the mouth to be closed at night and I started doing this and recording what happened with my sleep and an extraordinary benefit more.

Nation better sleep longer sleep. I mean, less resistance in the airway because your mouth is closed. And since this book is come out, which has been a couple months. I've received literally dozens and dozens and dozens of emails from people saying, oh my God, why didn't I know about this before? They're no longer snoring, you know, even people with with mild or sleep? Apnea, no longer have sleep apnea just by shutting their mouths.

I did the the mouse tape thing.

And I liked it. It worked out. I slept pretty nicely. And I mean instead. I mean, if that's what I love about this this book. It's such a simple thing that just breathe through your nose and can have all these

benefits. Sure. It's this one of the, you know, that's the foundation of healthy breathing that everyone needs to adhere to is it starts off with first acknowledging that as a species were messed up. Our faces are messed up. We become the worst breathers in the animal kingdom. The second is and this is the

The most of the, both, the foundation of the book is like, okay, we're screwed up. What can we do to fix it? And nasal breathing is is the first thing.

Another thing about breathe. I think, when most people think about breathing, they're always think about the breathing part because it feels nice, your lungs are filling up. You feel like I'm getting oxygen but you highlight research that the Excel is just as important. What happens in the Excel whenever we do Excel and what happens when we neglect that and are breathing?

So the only way to get a full nurse

Shushing breath in is to get that last breath out. Get that stale air out. A lot of us. When we first become aware of our breathing. We just putting are on top of are on top of there, but are should be, you know, your breath could be considered like like a cycle. It needs to cycle in. It needs to cycle out and what Carl style found. He was this choral conductor in the 50s who found that few of his singers were really.

Healing properly. They weren't moving their diaphragms up high enough and by just allowing them to engage more diaphragmatic movement. He completely changed the resonance and the volume of their voices and went on to teach opera singers of the Met Opera this. But he then went on to for 10 years, helped emphysema X by just increasing diaphragmatic Movement by just using breathing. He was able to effectively heal these people.

Oh, and have them walk out of the hospital, which is extraordinary. But it also makes perfect sense. These people had lost the ability to breathe properly, every single breath. They took was a struggle and they were stressing themselves out every moment of every day. We're gonna take a quick break for a word from our

And now back to the show and how do you, what do you do with the diaphragm to make sure all that are like, how do you tell your diaphragm squeeze that are out

more? Sure. So breathing's this wonderful thing because we do it unconsciously, we don't have to be thinking about it, but we can also do it consciously. So if you, if everyone just takes a big breath in. Now, through the nose, please,

as you breathe in your diaphragm, which is

this muscle underneath the lungs, because the lungs, don't,

Do anything on themselves? They need something to expand them and contract them. That's what the diaphragm does. So, when you take that breath in the diaphragm sinks, okay, and when you exhale, the diaphragm lifts up a little higher into your chest by increasing the movement of the diaphragm, there's so many benefits to it. But especially considering breathing. It allows you access to more of your lungs and by having access to more of your lungs, you can get in more.

Are with fewer breaths, you can breathe more efficiently. Breathing is something a lot of us do 25,000 times a day. If you can do it more efficiently, you're going to have huge benefits from this as has been clearly, studying the scene 1

q that I've used. I've heard to help you Excel is like pretty like you're holding your pee. And for some reason that makes the diaphragm go up. So that's what I decided to quickly think. I'm holding my pee in the night. For some reason. I'm able to get more air

out. I haven't tried that one.

One. I'm going to add that to my to my list activities here. I do know that that Carl style that the researcher who had done this and proven this. What he had patients do and this included Olympians. He was the guy who trained the 1968 track team, u.s. Track team to go down to Mexico City. They were the only team that did not use oxygen because they didn't need to, because they were breathing properly and they destroyed everybody. It was like the greatest Olympic performance and track,

Ever and so he would have them start with that inhale. And as they exhaled he'd have them go 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 and count from 1 to 10. And even when they were out of breath to start whispering it 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, 9 10 1 2 3 4 and by doing that and vocalizing. While you're doing it, you're able to engage more diaphragmatic movement

and what that also does it lengthened your breath. And this kind of like sideways to my next question because this is the most one of the most counterintuitive.

Two things I got from your book. When we take like I said earlier, when we typically think of breathing, we think about the oxygen part auctions, good nourishes, our bodies. It gives us energy. We need to do what we need to do. And then CO2, we want to get rid of that because it's waist, right, but you have this interesting research that actually, CO2 is an important part of our health and oxygen getting auction from breathing. It's not typically not a problem. It's like we're actually don't have enough CO2 in our system. Can you walk us through this counterintuitive

claim? Sure. So a lot of people with with chronic

Apologies people with emphysema people with other issues. Can have not not enough oxygen. You look at people with coronavirus. They don't have enough 02. So what would I was talking about and focusing on was was ordinary, like, healthy, people who don't have these underlying conditions and for healthy people. Oxygen is seldom the problem. And you can see this by using a pulse oximeter and seeing that you have 95 94, even 97 percent oxygen in your

In your bloodstream, that's great. But what few people consider in this blew my mind when I came across it is that we need a balance of CO2 and oxygen in the body for oxygen to disassociate from hemoglobin to feed our hungry cells. So CO2 is essential in this exchange and if we don't have enough of it, our bodies have to compensate and that compensation can start wearing us down.

So, you know, when you see people again out jogging doing CrossFit or whatever, or even sitting at an office in front of a computer in their breathing, thinking they're getting more oxygen into their tissues and muscles and organs. The opposite is happening, which is why their fingers are cold, which is why they get dizzy in their head, that feeling is caused by constriction. Is when you offload too much, CO2, you cause vasoconstriction.

Throughout your body.

And so, I guess, what do you do to increase levels of CO2? Just mean, it's breathe less, right? Or breathe? Unless?

Yeah, breathe. Normally is the key. And what what? That means for the vast majority of us I've found is to be breathing less and to be breathing slowly because in every breath, you're offloading CO2, right? And that's good. We need to offload that CO2 and whatever toxins our bodies or purging through our lungs. Of course, we need to do that.

But what you want to do is you don't want to offload too much of it. And so if we were to breathe 10 heavy breaths, here our CO2 levels are going to go down and when they go down again where our bodies are going to are forced to compensate for that. So by breathing, slowly, and breathing is closely in line with your metabolic needs, you're able to use the most breath, most efficiently, you're able to do more with less and that's the key to

So

much of health and fitness as well,

but you also, you can do these training things where you actually Elevate CO2. And you said you did this run? That sounded hellish where you would inhale for 3 seconds. Exhale 44 in hell for three, and then make your exhale five. So, basically, you were like taking in, like, less oxygen compared to like, I tried to just sitting still, and I was like, I felt I was never getting a full breath. What were you hoping to accomplish?

Polish by doing that.

So this is, this was the more extreme part of this. I would suggest people start with a mellower part and breathe, breathe, normally breathe in line, with your metabolic needs, which is slower and less, but what they found is, there's significant benefits to be had by controlling your breathing to a point. They call it hypoventilation training. So it's when you try to acclimate yourself to higher levels of CO2. And when you

Do this when you when you're out running. And again, I do not suggest anyone do this. Don't do this in your car, do it with a breathing therapist. But when you're out running, you try to double the exhales to to the inhales and immediately you feel all of this circulation throughout your body. You start heating up. I mean, it gets almost psychedelic because what that is is you are increasing circulation and oxygenation throughout your body when you're doing this you can get to a point.

Point where you're breathing. So little that your O2 is going to go down. That's for sure. But at the level we were doing, it are 0-2 wasn't going down. Our CO2, was going way up. And that what what triggers the need to breathe isn't lack of oxygen. It's an increase in CO2. So if you exhale right now and just hold your breath for 30 seconds or whatever and you feel that need to breathe that CO2. It's not oxygen.

Well, that's what you when we talk about that in deep, right?

One of the, some of the training that freedivers do is they had to get their bodies comfortable with elevated, CO2 levels.

Exactly. And and so, so many of those benefits, I was seeing this research, sort of dovetail together. It was, it was blowing my mind, see the benefits of people who have trained with this hypoventilation training. Increasing their threshold of CO2 and they found that the benefits of this are similar in many ways to altitude training. You can

Help build blood, you can pull more energy from lactic acid on. And on this guy, Xavier warrant in Paris, Paris 13 University is now researching the stuff big time, and they're actually using it for people with heart conditions, their loot using it because it helps people lose weight quicker because it actually allows you to offload more oxygen and you burn fat with oxygen. So there's yeah, I included, you know, about 20 references to Scientific studies looking at this stuff.

To me. It's fascinating. Just through breathing, you have access to all these different systems in the body,

whether you to talk about to like people with asthma. If they do the hypoventilation, it can help with asthma as

well. It makes a huge difference with so many people and I and again I included, I think 50 studies showing how slower Breathing by breathing less can really help people with asthma, asthmatics as a population. Tend to breathe way more than the rest of us, and they tend to breathe.

From their mouth. So they're exposing themselves to everything all the pollutants allergens, whatever else. In the environment all the time, which can exacerbate, their allergic reaction to asthma. If you think about someone with asthma, the last thing they want to do is suffer another asthma attack. So they become so sensitized to CO2 that whenever they think they're having an attack. What do they do? They breathe more and more and more which causes more constriction which

Guess what brings on an attack? So, by, teaching them to breathe, normally, I call it breathing less, but it's actually teaching them to Just Breathe normally in line with their metabolic needs. They've shown huge benefits for people with asthma.

And so, just to recap your the reason why elevated CO2 is necessary or you need CO2 is that it's what allows your body or your blood to or your body to take the oxygen off the blood cell and use it as.

That's right to move more efficiently. It allows your

body to do this more efficiently. Yes. Okay. So you

mentioned earlier, our Mauser are jacked up because of Modern Life, we eat soft foods. And so, our teeth are all kind of this affects breathing because constricts the nasal passages, as well. It makes our teeth growing crooked. And so, I mean, this happens to kids and that's why they go to the orthodontist. They get palate expanders braces straighten that out. Is it possible to reverse this in adulthood like it. Can we can we make our mouths?

More like our ancestors or is it too late for us?

Well, the key is with anything as preventive maintenance, right? When you're young, it's so important to have proper habits to be closing your mouth to not be mouth breathing at night. They've shown that breastfeeding versus bottle-feeding is so beneficial to Airway healthy. Eating harder foods. Can that masticatory stress can benefit mouth growth, but you know, for me youth was was many decades.

It's ago so I'm kind of hosed. And my mouth is we took cat-scans of my sinuses and I'm as messed up as anyone deviated septum clogging here and there Smallmouth. I had braces extractions headgear, all that crap. So it turns out that we can change a lot of what we have in adulthood. First of all, we can't own the air way. We can do this through oral pharyngeal, exercises, these tongue exercise, the sounds a little crazy, but it makes

Fix sent the tongues of muscle, very powerful muscle when we don't use it. When, when we're eating soft foods, and we're not using it properly, it can grow out of shape, just like anything else. So by toning that tongue, you can increase your Airway health and that's been been widely shown. But you can also help expand your to Smallmouth even in adulthood if people are listening there and you have a clean thumb, don't do this. If you know, even touching doorknobs,

Jobs or whatever, you can put your thumb on the top of your upper palate and right in the middle of that upper palate. There is a suture and these are the same sutures that are in the skull. Now, you can feel your skull and feel all these little ridges and cracks. So that's suture can open a virtually any age. I think up into your 70s which means the upper palate can be expanded at any age. When you expand that upper palate you expand your Airways. So I use this

Device called a homeo block, just to see if these claims were true. And I wore this thing at night for a year. We took a CAT scan before and after and I had huge benefits from this, my Airway opened up think about 15 almost 20% Which is enormous and that even built bone in my face, which we've been told is impossible bone. Mass. Only goes down once we're in our 30s, we can model it in one bone, right? In the middle.

Love our faces. So in the cat-scans proved it,

so yeah, that helped you they do expand in the are ways that help you. Breathe better. That first section is amazing because it, just about basic things. You can do to improve your breathing significantly. Its breathe through your nose, breathe more slowly than you think you need to breathe and you're probably are breathing right now. And then the second half of the book you talk. It's called, breathe breathing plus. And you wanted to like explore, like the the fringes like you're going back to like your deep territory, right? The fringes of breathing and

You talk about some of these people who are doing some crazy stuff with breathing. One of these guys we've talked about, on our podcast is Wim Hof, and he does a type of breathing that it has allowed him to, you know, he can warm up his body. It can his causes immune system to kill bacteria on demand. Where did what kind of breathing has is he doing? And where did he get this idea? Of this sort of breathing where you can basically take over involuntary aspects of your body,

so I wanted to

To start with, you know, in the book, start start with the problem real quick and start with a foundation that anyone can benefit from doesn't matter. If you're an elite athlete or an asthmatic or whatever. Just as you mentioned, nasal breathing exhaling, breathing, slow or breathing less. Huge Foundation of science, supporting that. Not a lot of people are going to disagree with it. But also, you know, you hear stories about women Xavier about things like holotropic breathwork these, these breeding practices that require more effort, right? This isn't just I'm going to breathe through.

Nose like they require some concerted effort to do this stuff, but I was curious to see how far breathing could take us what it could do to really heal ongoing. Chronic maladies what it could do to move us up that next level of human potential. And what when you know, everyone calls it with Hof method, but he's been very clear that he didn't invent any of this stuff. His breathing method has been around for thousands of years. People have been super heating there.

R bodies with this the bond Buddhist monks have been doing this for so long and and what they all have. So you can call it different things to mow when Hof method pranayama, but they're all doing the same things. They're allowing you to control your breath and when you control your breath, you can then take control of certain elements of your autonomic nervous system, which was supposed to have been according to Western medicine beyond our control. That's BS. We can absolutely control it.

You start controlling that you can start controlling immune function, which is why these people I talked to dozens of these people had autoimmune diseases, arthritis, psoriasis, diabetes. I mean, on and on, and on, and once they started using these methods to breathe, they were able to either blunt these symptoms or some of them claim to have outright cured them, and they've measured their progress with real real measurements. Real science, and I just thought this was

Fantastic and amazing seems too good to be true. But look what Wims done. He's been studying and Labs all over the world right now. We're just starting to crack this thing open, which is really exciting.

Yes, you talk about this one guy using it. I think a Hindu monk came, the United States and kind of one of those Whirlwind tour, but he was doing crazy stuff. He was with breathing. He was able to control his heart beats only beat once every 300 seconds. So like people thought he was dead like the doctors thought he was dead, but he was actually

So alive. Yeah, this was on the on the outer fringes of breathing. I tried to find the best breather in history and their stories of these people, you know, who can superheat their bodies for hours at a time, melt snow melt wet sheets. And we know this is true Herbert, Benson at Harvard has studied these guys extensively in anyone can look that up online and find those studies published in nature. The most prestigious scientific journal in the world. So the, I think the

Best breather that I could find that there were some scientific Foundation to was the sky. Swami, Rama grew up in the Himalayas in the 70s. He came to the states to kind of show what he could do. And they studied him at the menninger clinic and navy physicist, studied him with all, the latest instruments at that time. So this wasn't, you know, some new-age dude, in India. This this was a real scientist and they found that he could flood

His heartbeat at a, at a rate of 300 beats per minute for 30 seconds at a time. Apparently, he could do it for much longer than that, which would it's called atrial fibrillation which would kill most of us, but he was able to do this on command even more amazingly, he was able to shift the blood flow in his hand, about 11 degrees from his thumb to his finger. So one side was all gray and the other side was was all red with circulation.

No, I mean it goes on and on and on in these measurements this these reports were published and the New York Times They were measured very carefully by experts in the field and still people find it pretty hard to believe. Anyone could have this control over their systems, but I think whim is kind of the new Reincarnation of Swami Rama and he's he's busting down what we thought was possible time and time again,