Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

He knew that when oxygen went into a cell, carbon dioxide came out. But Bohr didn’t know why this exchange took place.

How did breathing really work? He began experimenting. Bohr gathered chickens, guinea pigs, grass snakes, dogs, and horses, and measured how much oxygen the animals consumed and how much carbon dioxide they produced.

Blood with the most carbon dioxide in it (more acidic) loosened oxygen from hemoglobin. In some ways, carbon dioxide worked as a kind of divorce lawyer, a go-between to separate oxygen from its ties so it could be free to land another mate.

rapid and panicked breaths would purge carbon dioxide. Just a few moments of heavy breathing above metabolic needs could cause reduced blood flow to muscles, tissues, and organs. We’d feel light-headed, cramp up, get a headache, or even black out. If these tissues were denied consistent blood flow for long enough, they’d break down.

when a man or animal breathes oxygen, or [air] enriched with oxygen, no more of that gas is consumed, no more heat is produced and no more carbon dioxide is exhaled than when air alone is breathed.” For a healthy body, overbreathing or inhaling pure oxygen would have no benefit, no effect on oxygen delivery to our tissues and organs, and could actually create a state of oxygen deficiency, leading to relative suffocation.

“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,” Henderson later wrote.

I understood why only one person showed up for the first conference he held on breathing, in 2010, and why, after honing his message and building his research base, he was now something of a Swedish media star

In these interviews, he championed the therapeutic effects of nasal breathing and beseeched audiences with the same message of slow breathing.

Every few weeks I’d get a new email or a Skype call about some new long-lost scientific discovery he’d just unearthed in a medical library.

he begins breathing. But slowly, very slowly. He inhales and exhales three times slower than the average American, turning those 18 breaths a minute into six.

his carbon dioxide levels rise from 5 percent to 6 percent. They keep rising. A minute later, Olsson’s levels are 25 percent higher than they were just a few minutes ago, taking him from an unhealthy hypocapnic zone to squarely within a medically normal range. All the while, his blood pressure drops about five points and heart rate sinks to the mid-60s. What hasn’t changed is his oxygen. From start to finish, even though he’s been breathing at a third of the rate considered normal, his oxygen hasn’t wavered: it stayed at 97 percent.

no matter how slowly I breathed or how hard I pedaled, my oxygen levels held steady at 97 percent. 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.

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.

I tried to inhale and exhale slower and slower, from my usual exercising rate of 20 breaths a minute to just six. I immediately felt a sense of air hunger and claustrophobia. After a minute or so I looked down at the pulse oximeter to see how much oxygen I was losing, how starved my body had become. But my oxygen hadn’t decreased with these very slow breaths, as I or anyone else might expect. My levels rose.

A last word on slow breathing. It goes by another name: prayer. When Buddhist monks chant

each spoken phrase lasts six seconds, with six seconds to inhale before the chant starts again.

In 2001, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy gathered two dozen subjects, covered them with sensors to measure blood flow, heart rate, and nervous system feedback, then had them recite a Buddhist mantra as well as the original Latin version of the rosary, the Catholic prayer cycle of the Ave Maria, which is repeated half by a priest and half by the congregation. They were stunned to find that the average number of breaths for each cycle was “almost exactly” identical, just a bit quicker than the pace of the Hindu, Taoist, and Native American prayers: 5.5 breaths a minute.

Whenever they followed this slow breathing pattern, blood flow to the brain increased and the systems in the body entered a state of coherence, when the functions of heart, circulation, and nervous system are coordinated to peak efficiency.

A decade after the Pavia tests, two renowned professors and doctors in New York, Patricia Gerbarg and Richard Brown, used the same breathing pattern on patients with anxiety and depression, minus the praying. Some of these patients had trouble breathing slowly, so Gerbarg and Brown recommended they start with an easier rhythm of three-second inhales with at least the same length exhale.

It turned out that the most efficient breathing rhythm occurred when both the length of respirations and total breaths per minute were locked in to a spooky symmetry: 5.5-second inhales followed by 5.5-second exhales, which works out almost exactly to 5.5 breaths a minute. This was the same pattern of the rosary. The results were profound, even when practiced for just five to ten minutes a day. “I have seen patients transformed by adopting regular breathing practices,” said Brown.

Gerbarg and Brown would write books and publish several scientific articles about the restorative power of the slow breathing, which would become known as “resonant breathing” or Coherent Breathing.

In many ways, this resonant breathing offered the same benefits as meditation for people who didn’t want to meditate. Or yoga for people who didn’t like to get off the couch. It offered the healing touch of prayer for people who weren’t religious. Did it matter if we breathed at a rate of six or five seconds, or were a half second off? It did not, as long as the breaths were in the range of 5.5.

In other words, the meditations, Ave Marias, and dozens of other prayers that had been developed over the past several thousand years weren’t all baseless. Prayer heals, especially when it’s practiced at 5.5 breaths a minute.

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.

Buteyko developed a protocol based on the breathing habits of these healthiest patients, which he’d later call Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing. The techniques were many and they varied, but the purpose of each was to train patients to always breathe as closely as possible to their metabolic needs, which almost always meant taking in less air. 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.

runner named Emil Zátopek was experimenting with his own breath-restriction techniques. Zátopek never wanted to become a runner. When the management at the shoe factory where he was working elected him for a local race, he tried to refuse. Zátopek told them he was unfit, that he had no interest, that he’d never run in a competition. But he competed anyway and came in second out of 100 contestants.

Four years later he broke the Czech national records for the 2,000, 3,000, and 5,000 meters. Zátopek developed his own training methods to give himself an edge. He’d run as fast as he could holding his breath, take a few huffs and puffs and then do it all again. It was an extreme version of Buteyko’s methods, but Zátopek didn’t call it Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing. Nobody did. It would become known as hypoventilation training.

Over the years, Zátopek’s approach was widely derided and mocked, but he ignored the critics. At the 1952 Olympics, he won gold in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters. On the heels of his success, he decided to compete in the marathon, an event he had neither trained for nor run in his life. He won gold. Zátopek would claim 18 world records, four Olympic golds and a silver over his career. He would later be named the “Greatest Runner of All Time” by Runner’s World magazine.

Then, decades later, in the 1970s, a hard-assed U.S. swim coach named James Counsilman rediscovered it. Counsilman was notorious for his “hurt, pain, and agony”–based training techniques, and hypoventilation fit right in. 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.

Counsilman used it to train the U.S. Men’s Swimming team for the Montreal Olympics. They won 13 gold medals, 14 silver, and 7 bronze, and they set world records in 11 events. It was the greatest performance by a U.S. Olympic swim team in history.

Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more energy with each breath. Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere.

Just a few weeks of the training significantly increased endurance, reduced more “trunk fat,” improved cardiovascular function, and boosted muscle mass compared to normal-breathing exercise. This list goes on. The takeaway is that hypoventilation works. It helps train the body to do more with less. But that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant.

I want to believe that this training may be helping me as it helped Zátopek, Counsilman’s swimmers, Wooron’s runners, and everyone else, but the past several minutes have been a challenge. A half hour into all this I’m beginning to resent my life choices.

The warmth moves higher through my face and wraps around the crown of my head. This must be the good headache Olsson was talking about, of carbon dioxide increasing and oxygen dislodging from hemoglobin to those hungry cells, of the vessels in my brain and body expanding, so engorged with fresh blood that they’re sending dull pain signals to my nervous system.

Buteyko was once invited to England to meet with Prince Charles, who was suffering from breathing difficulties brought on by allergies. Buteyko helped the prince, and he helped heal upward of 80 percent of his patients suffering from hypertension, arthritis, and other ailments. Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing was especially effective in treating respiratory diseases. It seemed to work like a miracle for asthma.

Asthma is an immune system sensitivity that provokes constriction and spasms in the airways. Pollutants, dust, viral infections, cold air, and more can all lead to attacks. 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.

In 2014, Meuret and a team of researchers gathered 120 randomly selected asthma sufferers, measured their pulmonary lung functions, lung size, and blood gases, and then gave them a handheld capnometer, which tracked the carbon dioxide in their exhaled breath. Over four weeks, the asthmatics would carry the device around and practice breathing less to keep their carbon dioxide levels at a healthy level of 5.5 percent. If the levels dipped, the patients would breathe less until the carbon dioxide levels rose back.

Buteyko and his methods have been largely dismissed by today’s medical community as pseudoscience.

One study at the Mater Hospital in Brisbane, Australia, found that when asthmatic adults followed Buteyko’s methods and decreased their air intake by a third, symptoms of breathlessness reduced by 70 percent and the need for reliever medication decreased by around 90 percent.

Almost all cellular functions in the body take place at a blood pH of around 7.4, our sweet spot between alkaline and acid. When we stray from that, the body will do whatever it can to get us back there.

They told me the same story, of how they’d been plagued by some chronic respiratory illness that no drug or surgery or medical therapy could fix. Of how they all “cured” themselves with nothing more than breathing less. The techniques they used varied, but all circled around the same premise: to extend the length of time between inhalations and exhalations. The less one breathes, the more one absorbs the warming touch of respiratory efficiency—and the further a body can go.

Nature functions in orders of magnitude. Mammals with the lowest resting heart rates live the longest. And it’s no coincidence that these are consistently the same mammals that breathe the slowest. The only way to retain a slow resting heart rate is with slow breaths.

By various means, in various ways, in various eras of human history, all these pulmonauts discovered the same thing. They discovered that 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. This is the perfect breath.

Last night, Olsson snored for three minutes while I clocked in at six, a 4,000 percent decrease from ten days ago. Our sleep apnea, which disappeared the first night of nasal breathing, has remained nonexistent. My blood pressure this morning was 20 points lower than its highest point at the beginning of the experiment; on average I’ve dropped 10 points. My carbon dioxide levels consistently rose and were finally nudging toward the “super endurance” mark shared by Buteyko’s healthiest subjects.

But the changes triggered by the rapid industrialization of farmed foods were severely damaging. Within just a few generations of eating this stuff, modern humans became the worst breathers in Homo history, the worst breathers in the animal kingdom.

I needed to get my hands on some skulls: old ones, and lots of them. I hadn’t been introduced to Marianna Evans yet, so I didn’t know the Morton Collection existed. I called some friends instead. One of them told me that my best chance of stumbling upon a large trove of centuries-old specimens was to fly to Paris and wait beside a set of trash cans along Rue Bonaparte. My guides would be waiting there on Tuesday night at seven p.m.

One of the guides I was following lit up her high-powered headlamp, the two others cinched their backpacks, and went down the first stone steps of a spiral staircase that led into pure blackness. The dead were downstairs. Six million of them, spread out in a labyrinth of halls, stalls, cathedrals, ossuaries, black rivers, and billionaire playrooms.

My guide, the woman with red-purple hair whom I’ll call Red, had spent 15 years mapping these dirty tunnels. She was fascinated with the stories and history of the place. She told me earlier that she discovered a new ossuary an hour’s hike from here in the crawl space of a cave. It was filled with a few thousand victims of a cholera epidemic that ravaged Paris in 1832. This was the time in Western history when small mouths, crooked teeth, and obstructed airways became the norm throughout much of industrial Europe. These were the skulls I was looking for.

By around 1500, the farming that had begun in Southwest Asia and the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years earlier took over the world. The human population grew to a half billion, 100 times what it had been at the dawn of agriculture. Life, at least for city dwellers, was miserable: streams of human waste gushed down city streets. Air was tainted by coal smoke and nearby rivers and lakes ran with blood, fat, hair, and acids from manufacturing runoff. Infections, disease, and plague were a constant menace.

Over the next few centuries, food would become more and more refined. Advances in milling removed the germ and bran from rice, leaving only the starchy white seed. Roller mills (and, later, steam mills) ripped the germ and bran from wheat, leaving only a soft, white flour. Meats, fruits, and vegetables were canned and bottled. All these methods extended the shelf life of foods and made them more accessible to the public. But they also made foods mushy and soft.