Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

The nose is crucial because it clears air, heats it, and moistens it for easier absorption.

Few of us ever consider how the nostrils of every living person pulse to their own rhythm, opening and closing like a flower in response to our moods, mental states, and perhaps even the sun and the moon.

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. Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite side of the prefrontal cortex, to the area that influences creative thought and plays a role in the formation of mental abstractions and the production of negative emotions.

Our bodies operate most efficiently in a state of balance, pivoting between action and relaxation, daydreaming and reasoned thought. This balance is influenced by the nasal cycle, and may even be controlled by it. It’s a balance that can also be gamed.

There are dozens of alternate nostril breathing techniques. I’ve started with the most basic. It involves placing an index finger over the left nostril and then inhaling and exhaling only through the right. I did this two dozen times after each meal today, to heat up my body and aid my digestion. Before meals, and any other time I wanted to relax, I’d switch sides, repeating the same exercise with my left nostril open.

I sense an immediate and potent clarity and relaxation, even a floatiness. As advertised, I’ve been entirely free of any gastroesophageal reflux. I haven’t registered the slightest stomach ache. Alternate nostril breathing appeared to have delivered these benefits, but these techniques, I’d found, were usually fleeting, lasting only 30 minutes or so.

consciously controlling breathing can significantly influence our nervous system function, sleep quality, heartbeat, and blood flow.

Genesis 2:7 described how “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

The Native Americans explained to Catlin that breath inhaled through the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress and disease. On the other hand, breath inhaled through the nose kept the body strong, made the face beautiful, and prevented disease. “The air which enters the lungs is as different from that which enters the nostrils as distilled water is different from the water in an ordinary cistern or a frog-pond,” he wrote.

He told me that mouthbreathing contributed to periodontal disease and bad breath, and was the number one cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene.

He recommended his patients tape their mouths shut at night.

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.

Mouth taping, Burhenne said, helped a five-year-old patient of his overcome ADHD, a condition directly attributed to breathing difficulties during sleep. It helped Burhenne and his wife cure their own snoring and breathing problems.

The specialist advised that the only way to open her nose was through surgery or medications. She tried mouth taping instead. “The first night, I lasted five minutes before I ripped it off,” she told me. On the second night, she was able to tolerate the tape for ten minutes. A couple of days later, she slept through the night. Within six weeks, her nose opened up. “It’s a classic example of use it or lose it,” Kearney said.

When the nose is denied regular use, it will atrophy.

It makes complete sense!

Keeping the nose constantly in use, however, trains the tissues inside the nasal cavity and throat to flex and stay open.

Eventually I realized that all I or anyone really needed was a postage-stamp-size piece of tape at the center of the lips—a Charlie Chaplin mustache moved down an inch. That’s it. This approach felt less claustrophobic and allowed a little space on the sides of the mouth if I needed to cough or talk.

3M Nexcare Durapore “durable cloth” tape, an all-purpose surgical tape with a gentle adhesive. It was comfortable, had no chemical scent, and didn’t leave residue.

I’d been warned by Burhenne that sleep tape won’t do anything to help treat sleep apnea. My experience suggested otherwise. As my snoring disappeared, so did apnea.

larger lungs equaled longer lives. Our ability to breathe full breaths, according to the researchers, appears to be “literally a measure of living capacity.”

aging doesn’t have to be a one-way path of decline. The internal organs are malleable, and we can change them at nearly any time.

Moderate exercise like walking or cycling has been shown to boost lung size by up to 15 percent.

Stough liked to sing and teach singing. He noticed how his fellow singers would belt out a few measures, stop to take a breath, and then belt out a few more. Each seemed to be gasping for air, holding it high in the chest, and releasing it too soon. Singing, talking, yawning, sighing—any vocalization we make occurs during the exhalation. Stough’s students had thin and weak voices because, he believed, they had thin and weak exhalations. While directing choirs at Westminster Choir College in New Jersey, Stough began training his singers to exhale properly, to build up their respiratory muscles and enlarge their lungs. Within a few sessions, the students were singing clearer, more robustly, and with added nuance.

his autobiography, Dr. Breath.

Emphysema is a gradual deterioration of lung tissue marked by chronic bronchitis and coughing. The lungs become so damaged that people with the disease can no longer absorb oxygen effectively. They’re forced to take several short breaths very fast, often breathing in far more air than they need, but still feel out of breath. Emphysema had no known cure.

Emphysema, he realized, was a disease of exhalation. The patients were suffering not because they couldn’t get fresh air into their lungs, but because they couldn’t get enough stale air out.

As we inhale, negative pressure draws blood into the heart; as we exhale, blood shoots back out into the body and lungs, where it recirculates. It’s similar to the way the ocean floods into shore, then ebbs out.

typical adult engages as little as 10 percent of the range of the diaphragm when breathing, which overburdens the heart, elevates blood pressure, and causes a rash of circulatory problems. Extending those breaths to 50 to 70 percent of the diaphragm’s capacity will ease cardiovascular stress and allow the body to work more efficiently. For this reason, the diaphragm is sometimes referred to as “the second heart,” because it not only beats to its own rhythm but also affects the rate and strength of the heartbeat.

“Breathing heavy, breathing quickly and as deeply as you can—I realized this is the worst advice anyone could give you,” Olsson told me. Big, heavy breaths were bad for us because they depleted our bodies of, yes, carbon dioxide.

the best way to prevent many chronic health problems, improve athletic performance, and extend longevity was to focus on how we breathed, specifically to balance oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the body. To do this, we’d need to learn how to inhale and exhale slowly.

If you lined up all the tubes in the airways of your body, they’d reach from New York City to Key West—more than 1,500 miles.

The cellular cruise ship is filled with “guest rooms.” In your blood cells, those rooms are the protein called hemoglobin. Oxygen takes a seat inside a hemoglobin; then the red blood cells journey upstream, deeper into the body.

Blood will grow darker as oxygen leaves. The blood in the veins will appear more bluish (it’s actually darker red) because of the way in which light penetrates skin. Blue light has a shorter, stronger wavelength than other colors, which is also why the ocean and sky appear blue at a distance.

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.

Breathing less allowed animals to produce more energy, more efficiently.

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;

“Carbon dioxide is, in fact, a more fundamental component of living matter than is oxygen.”

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.

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.

just as we’ve become a culture of overeaters, we’ve also become a culture of overbreathers.

We’ve become conditioned to breathe too much, just as we’ve been conditioned to eat too much.

hate jogging. Unlike with other physical activities—especially water sports like surfing or swimming—whenever I jog, I’m fully conscious of the misery and boredom of every second.

Me too!

Slower, longer exhales, of course, mean higher carbon dioxide levels. With that bonus carbon dioxide, we gain a higher aerobic endurance.

Training the body to breathe less actually increases VO2 max, which can not only boost athletic stamina but also help us live longer and healthier lives.

What if overbreathing wasn’t the result of hypertension and headaches but the cause?

Hypo, which comes from the Greek for “under” (as in hypodermic needle), is the opposite of hyper, meaning “over.”

Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere.

Almost all cellular functions in the body take place at a blood pH of around 7.4, our sweet spot between alkaline and acid.