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that 90 percent of us—very likely me, you, and almost everyone you know—is breathing incorrectly
It will take the average reader about 10,000 breaths to read from here to the end of the book.
By the law of averages, you will take 670 million breaths in your lifetime.
The more we cooked, the more soft, calorie-rich food we consumed, the larger our brains grew and the tighter our airways became.
In colder climates, our noses would grow narrower and longer to more efficiently heat up air before it entered our lungs; our skin would grow lighter to take in more sunshine for production of vitamin D. In sunny and warm environments, we adapted wider and flatter noses, which were more efficient at inhaling hot and humid air; our skin would grow darker to protect us from the sun.
“In school, when I was young, teachers walked around the classroom, man, and pop-pop-pop.” He smacks the back of his own head for emphasis. “You’re breathing from your mouth, you get pop,” he says. Mouthbreathing leads to sickness and is disrespectful, he told me, which is why he and everyone else he grew up with in Puebla, Mexico, learned to breathe through the nose.
the intensity of exercise increased during this phase, the rate of breathing decreased.
Mouthbreathing causes the body to lose 40 percent more water.
And contrary to what most of us might think, no amount of snoring is normal,
Ninety percent of children have acquired some degree of deformity in their mouths and noses.
Forty-five percent of adults snore occasionally, and a quarter of the population snores constantly.
The interior of the nose, it turned out, is blanketed with erectile tissue, the same flesh that covers the penis, clitoris, and nipples.
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.
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.
the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity.
Our ability to breathe full breaths was, according to the researchers, “literally a measure of living capacity.”
Every healthy cell in the body is fueled by oxygen, and this is how it’s delivered. The entire cruise takes about a minute, and the overall numbers are staggering. Inside each of our 25 trillion red blood cells are 270 million hemoglobin, each of which has room for four oxygen molecules. That’s a billion molecules of oxygen boarding and disembarking within each red blood cell cruise ship.
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.
Japanese, African, Hawaiian, Native American, Buddhist, Taoist, Christian—these cultures and religions all had somehow developed the same prayer techniques, requiring the same breathing patterns. And they all likely benefited from the same calming effect.
The key to optimum breathing, and all the health, endurance, and longevity benefits that come with it, is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume. To breathe, but to breathe less.
What if overbreathing wasn’t the result of hypertension and headaches but the cause?
How many breaths we took per minute was less important to Buteyko, as long as we were breathing no more than about six liters per minute at rest.
the optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters.
The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales.
As random as it might seem, this mundane act—that few seconds of soft chewing—was the catalyst for writing this book.
than how we ate it. Chewing.
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.
50 percent of kids with ADHD were shown to no longer have symptoms after having their adenoids and tonsils removed.
To some researchers, it’s no coincidence that eight of the top ten most common cancers affect organs cut off from normal blood flow during extended states of stress.
Benson flew to the Himalayas in 1981, recruited three monks, hooked them up to sensors that measured the temperature in their fingers and toes, and then asked them to practice Tummo breathing. During the practice, the temperature in the monks’ extremities went up by as much as 17 degrees Fahrenheit and stayed there.
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
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Sandoz
Grof was one of the first-ever test subjects of lysergic acid diethylamide-25, better known as LSD.
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.
When we’re breathing too slowly and carbon dioxide levels rise, the central chemoreceptors monitor these changes and send alarm signals to the brain, telling our lungs to breathe faster and more deeply. When we’re breathing too quickly, these chemoreceptors direct the body to breathe more slowly to increase carbon dioxide levels. This is how our bodies determine how fast and often we breathe, not by the amount of oxygen, but by the level of carbon dioxide.
Up to 80 percent of office workers (according to one estimate) suffer from something called continuous partial attention. 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. Sometimes we won’t breathe at all for a half minute or longer. The problem is serious enough that the National Institutes of Health has enlisted several researchers, including Dr. David Anderson and Dr. Margaret Chesney, to study its effects over the past decades.
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Rama exhaled, calmed himself, lowered his thick eyelids, and then began breathing, carefully controlling the air entering and exiting his body. The lines on the EEG readout grew longer and softer, from hyperactive beta waves to calming and meditative alpha, and then to long and low delta, the brain waves identified with deep sleep. Rama stayed in this comatose state for a half hour, becoming so relaxed at one point that he began gently snoring. When he “woke up,” he gave a detailed recap of the conversation in the room that had occurred while he displayed brain waves of deep sleep.
Rama shifted his focus from his brain to his heart. He sat motionless, breathed a few times, and then, when given a signal, slowed his heart rate from 74 to 52 beats in less than 60 seconds. Later, he increased his heart rate from 60 to 82 beats within eight seconds. At one point, Rama’s heart rate went to zero, and stayed there for 30 seconds. Green thought Rama had shut off his heart completely, but upon closer inspection of the EKG, he found that Rama had commanded it to beat at 300 beats per minute.
Within 15 minutes, he was able to create a temperature difference of 11 degrees between his little finger and thumb.
All matter is, at its most basic level, energy.
The more oxygen life can consume, the more electron excitability it gains, the more animated it becomes. When living matter is bristling and able to absorb and transfer electrons in a controlled way, it remains healthy. When cells lose the ability to offload and absorb electrons, they begin to break down.
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.
The best way to keep tissues in the body healthy was to mimic the reactions that evolved in early aerobic life on Earth—specifically, to flood our bodies with a constant presence of that “strong electron acceptor”: oxygen.
Modern medicine, they said, was amazingly efficient at cutting out and stitching up parts of the body in emergencies, but sadly deficient at treating milder, chronic systemic maladies—the asthma, headaches, stress, and autoimmune issues that most of the modern population contends with.
“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.
huge sinus cavities, strong jaws, and straight teeth. Almost all humans born before 300 years ago shared these traits because they chewed a lot.
ALTERNATE NOSTRIL BREATHING (NADI SHODHANA) This standard pranayama technique improves lung function and lowers heart rate, blood pressure, and sympathetic stress. It’s an effective technique to employ before a meeting, an event, or sleep. (Optional) Hand Positioning: Place the thumb of your right hand gently over your right nostril and the ring finger of that same hand on the left nostril. The forefinger and middle finger should rest between the eyebrows. Close the right nostril with the thumb and inhale through the left nostril very slowly. At the top of the breath, pause briefly, holding
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BREATHING COORDINATION This technique helps to engage more movement from the diaphragm and increase respiratory efficiency. It should never be forced; each breath should feel soft and enriching. Sit up so that the spine is straight and chin is perpendicular to the body. Take a gentle breath in through the nose. At the top of the breath begin counting softly aloud from one to 10 over and over (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). As you reach the natural conclusion of the exhale, keep counting but do so in a whisper, letting the voice softly trail out. Then keep going
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