Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

Within a century, population shrank two inches, to less than five-five. The human face began rapidly deteriorating, too. Mouths shrank and facial bones grew stunted. Dental disease became rampant, and the incidence of crooked teeth and jaws increased tenfold in the Industrial Age.

Back in the quarries, Red led me through the narrow opening of the ossuary, across rocks and bones and broken bottles. She told me how the cholera epidemic of the early 1800s killed close to 20,000 people. The authorities had nowhere to put the dead, so they dug a big hole in Montparnasse Cemetery and buried them with quicklime to disintegrate the flesh. The ossuary was located at the bottom of that hole.

Researchers have suspected that industrialized food was shrinking our mouths and destroying our breathing for as long as we’ve been eating this way. In the 1800s, several scientists hypothesized that these problems were linked to deficiencies of vitamin D; without it, bones in the face, airways, and body couldn’t develop. Others thought the lack of vitamin C was the culprit.

The same story played out no matter where he went. 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.

Deep inside Melanesian islands he found tribes whose meals consisted of pumpkins, pawpaws, coconut crabs, and sometimes long pigs (humans).

Some cultures ate nothing but meat, while others were mostly vegetarian. Some relied primarily on homemade cheese; others consumed no dairy at all.

While the foods in these diets varied, they all contained the same high amounts of vitamins and minerals: from one and a half to 50 times that of modern diets. All of them.

In 1939, Price published Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, a 500-page doorstop of data collected during his travels. It was “a masterpiece of research,” according to the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Earnest Hooton called it one of the “epochal pieces of research.” But others hated it, and vehemently disagreed with Price’s conclusions. It wasn’t Price’s facts and figures, or even his dietary advice that made them bristle.

some complained that Price overreached, that his observations were too anecdotal and his sample sizes too small.

The problem had less to do with what we were eating than how we ate it. Chewing. It was the constant stress of chewing that was lacking from our diets—not vitamin A, B, C, or D. Ninety-five percent of the modern, processed diet was soft.

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.

I left Paris mildly haunted. Not by the piles of bones in those underground warrens, but by the comprehensiveness of our folly. What looked like human progress—all that milling, mass distribution, and preservation of food—had horrible consequences. Breathing slow, less, and exhaling deeply, I realized, none of it would really matter unless we were able to get those breaths through our noses, down our throats, and into the lungs.

I talked for months with Peter, a laser technician who worked in the aeronautics industry in Seattle. He’d scheduled a surgery, hoping to clear up some minor obstruction, and, against his permission, had 75 percent of his turbinates removed over two procedures. Within days of the first, he felt a sense of suffocation. He couldn’t sleep. The surgeons convinced Peter they hadn’t removed enough, so they went back in. The second surgery made things much worse. For years later, each breath Peter took shot a bolt of pain to his brain, as if it had been delivered from an air pump. Doctors told Peter nothing was wrong; they prescribed antidepressants

I traveled thousands of miles to meet with other empty nose syndrome sufferers, trying to get context on this confounding and cruel condition. I learned that Peter’s story really wasn’t unique; there were thousands of people in countries all over the world afflicted with even worse fates. They too had been living successful and happy lives.

They’d had their noses examined and been ushered into surgery. They woke up to find much of their nasal structures removed, sometimes against their permission. With every breath they felt more breathless and anxious, a pain and dryness coating their airways. Many were reassured that any discomfort would get better in time. It often got worse.

Their doctors, families, and friends couldn’t understand. Having access to more air, more quickly, could only be an advantage, they said. But we know now that the opposite is more often true.

the empty nose stories spooked me enough to explore other options before I ever went under the knife to fix my obstructed breathing. So I dug a little deeper, a little lower, into the mouth. • • • Sleep apnea and snoring, asthma and ADHD, are all linked to obstruction in the mouth.

Over and over again, the children who’d had teeth removed and had undergone retractive orthodontics suffered from the same stunted mouth and facial growth. As they grew up, and the rest of their bodies and heads grew larger, their mouths were forced to stay the same size. This mismatch created a problem at the center of the face: eyes would droop, cheeks would puff up, and chins would recess. The more teeth these patients had extracted, the longer they wore braces and other devices, the more obstruction seemed to develop in their airways.

in the last few years. Hundreds of leading orthodontists and dentists have come out in support of Mew’s position, saying that, yes, traditional orthodontics were making breathing worse in half their patients.

The strongest endorsement came in April 2018, when Stanford University Press published a 216-page monograph by famed evolutionary biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and Dr. Sandra Kahn, an orthodontist, detailing hundreds of scientific references that supported Mew’s research. In a short time, Mew’s outlier theories

He explained that the first step to improving airway obstruction wasn’t orthodontics but instead involved maintaining correct “oral posture.” Anyone could do this, and it was free. It just meant holding the lips together, with teeth almost touching (molars two to three millimeters apart) and the tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck. When sitting or standing, the spine should form a slight J shape—straight until it reaches the small of the back, where it naturally curves outward. While maintaining this posture, we should always breathe slowly through the nose into the abdomen.

Naropa harnessed the power of his breath to keep himself from freezing to death. The practice became known as Tummo, the Tibetan word for “inner fire.” Tummo was dangerous. If used incorrectly, it could elicit intense surges of energy, which could cause serious mental harm. For that reason, it was reserved only for advanced monks and stayed in the Himalayas, locked up in the Tibetan monasteries for the next thousand years.

Her name was Alexandra David-Néel, and she was in her mid-40s traveling alone through India—unheard-of at the time for a Western woman. David-Néel had spent most of her life exploring different philosophies and religions.

Along the way she happened into a cave high in the Himalayas, just as Naropa had done. It was there that a Tibetan holy man passed down the instructions for the superheating power of Tummo. “[Tummo was] but a way devised by the Thibetan hermits of enabling themselves to live without endangering their health on the high hills,” wrote David-Néel.

David-Néel would rely on the practice over and over again to keep happy, healthy, and heated as she hiked for 19 hours a day in freezing temperatures without food or water, at elevations above 18,000 feet.

I take another giant inhale, then roll the air up to my chest and exhale, like a wave. I’ve been doing this for what feels like five minutes. My hands are tingling and my intestines feel like they’re slowly uncoiling. I let out an uncontrolled moan. “Yes!” McGee cheers. “Expression is the opposite of depression! Go for it!”

This self-expression is an important part of Tummo, McGee said before we started. It reminds me that the stress I’m creating is different from the stress of, say, running late for an important meeting. It is conscious stress.

I want to condition myself so I can remain flexible to the constant pressures of modern life.

Professional surfers, mixed martial arts fighters, and Navy SEALs use Tummo-style breathing to get into the zone before a competition or black ops mission. It’s also especially useful for middle-aged people who suffer from lower-grade stress, aches and pains, and slowing metabolisms.

Simpler and less intense methods of breathing slow, less, through the nose with a big exhale, can also diffuse stress and restore balance. These techniques can be life-changing, and I’d seen dozens of people changed by them. But they can also take a while, especially for those with long-standing chronic conditions.

Sometimes the body needs more than a soft nudge to get realigned. Sometimes it needs a violent shove. That’s what Tummo does.

How exactly can conscious extreme breathing hack into the autonomic nervous system? Dr. Stephen Porges, a scientist and professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, has studied the nervous system and its response to stress for the past 30 years. His primary focus is the vagus nerve, a meandering network within the system that connects to all the major internal organs.

When perceived stress level is very high, the vagus nerve slows heart rate, circulation, and organ functions.

Our tendency to faint is controlled by the vagal system, specifically how sensitive we are to perceived danger.

It’s much more common, especially in the modern world, to never experience full-blown, life-threatening stress, but to never fully relax either. We’ll spend our days half-asleep and nights half-awake, lolling in a gray zone of half-anxiety.

In the past decade, surgeons have implanted electrical nodes in patients that work as an artificial vagal nerve to restart blood flow and communication between organs. The procedure is called vagus nerve stimulation, and it’s highly effective for patients suffering from anxiety, depression, and autoimmune diseases. But there is another, less invasive way Porges found to stimulate the vagus nerve: breathing.

Willing ourselves to breathe slowly will open up communication along the vagal network and relax us into a parasympathetic state. Breathing really fast and heavy on purpose flips the vagal response the other way, shoving us into a stressed state.

“You are not the passenger,” McGee keeps yelling at me. “You are the pilot!”

When Alexandra David-Néel finally returned to Paris and wrote about Tummo and other Buddhist breathing techniques and meditations in her 1927 book, My Journey to Lhasa, few doctors and medical researchers believed the stories. Few could accept that breathing alone could keep a body warm in freezing temperatures. Fewer believed it could control immune function and heal diseases.

Eventually, a Harvard Medical School researcher named Herbert Benson thought it might be time to put Tummo to the test. 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.

Hof’s wife had taken her own life after years of depression. He had sought refuge from his pain by deepening his practice of yoga, meditation, and breathing practices. He unearthed the ancient technique of Tummo, honed it, simplified it, repackaged it for mass consumption, and began promoting its powers in a string of daredevil stunts that would have been quickly discounted if the media hadn’t been around to verify them.

Over the span of a decade, Hof broke 26 world records, each more baffling than the last. These stunts earned him international fame, and his smiling, frost-covered face soon appeared on dozens of magazine covers, in flashy documentary specials, and in a handful of books.

This practice of heavy breathing along with regular cold exposure was later discovered to release the stress hormones adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine on command. The burst of adrenaline gave heavy breathers energy and released a battery of immune cells programmed to heal wounds, fight off pathogens and infection. The huge spike in cortisol helped downgrade short-term inflammatory immune responses, while a squirt of norepinephrine redirected blood flow from the skin, stomach, and reproductive organs to muscles, the brain, and other areas essential in stressful situations.

That night McGee tried Wim Hof’s heavy breathing technique. “For the first time in a long time, I slept peacefully,” he told me. He signed up for Hof’s ten-week video course, and within weeks watched as his insulin levels normalized, pain subsided, and blood pressure plunged. He quit taking enalapril and reduced his insulin intake by around 80 percent. He still took ibuprofen, but only a pill or two once a week.

Twenty thousand others in Hof’s community exchange blood work data and other metrics of their transformations online. The before-and-after results confirmed their claims. Some of these people were reducing inflammatory markers (C-reactive protein) 40-fold within just a few weeks.

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. This flip-flopping—breathing all-out, then not at all, getting really cold and then hot again—is the key to Tummo’s magic. It forces the body into high stress one minute, a state of extreme relaxation the next.

Carbon dioxide levels in the blood crash, then they build back up. Tissues become oxygen deficient and then flooded again. The body becomes more adaptable and flexible and learns that all these...

Getting here took some effort, and if I wasn’t laid out on a mat in a park, breathing this hard for this long could be dangerous. McGee repeatedly told me, as he told all his students, to never, ever practice Tummo while driving, walking, or in “any other environment where you might get hurt if you pass out.” And never practice it if you might have a heart condition or are pregnant.

Some pulmonauts, like Anders Olsson and other slow-and-less proponents, argue that this kind of forced overbreathing could actually be more damaging than it’s worth “given the adrenaline society we live in,” Olsson told me. I’m less certain. Alexandra David-Néel used Tummo and other ancient breathing and meditation practices until she died in 1969, at the age of 100.