Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

introductory course in breathing to learn a technique called Sudarshan Kriya.

the body’s heat, and how each inhaled breath provides us with new energy and each exhale releases old, stale energy.

Their transformation was a matter of training; they’d coaxed their lungs to work harder, to tap the pulmonary capabilities that the rest of us ignore.

To them breathing wasn’t an unconscious act; it wasn’t something they just did. It was a force, a medicine, and a mechanism through which they could gain an almost superhuman power.

our capacity to breathe has changed through the long processes of human evolution, and that the way we breathe has gotten markedly worse since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

many modern maladies—asthma, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, psoriasis, and more—could either be reduced or reversed simply by changing the way we inhale and exhale.

breathing allows us to hack into our own nervous system, control our immune response, and restore our health. Yes, changing how we breathe will help us live longer.

But why do I need to learn how to breathe? I’ve been breathing my whole life.

breathing is not binary.

lack of chewing associated with this soft diet stunted bone development in his dental arches and sinus cavity, leading to chronic nasal congestion.

Twenty-five sextillion molecules (that’s 250 with 20 zeros after it) take this same voyage 18 times a minute, 25,000 times a day.

Forty percent of today’s population suffers from chronic nasal obstruction, and around half of us are habitual mouthbreathers, with females and children suffering the most.

When mouths don’t grow wide enough, the roof of the mouth tends to rise up instead of out, forming what’s called a V-shape or high-arched palate.

The upward growth impedes the development of the nasal cavity, shrinking it and disrupting the delicate structures in the nose. The reduced nasal space leads to obstruction and inhibits airflow.

Congestion begets congestion, which gives us no other option but to habitually breathe from the mouth.

humans are now the only ones to routinely have misaligned jaws, overbites, underbites, and snaggled teeth, a condition formally called malocclusion.

Evolution doesn’t always mean progress, Evans told me. It means change. And life can change for better or worse.

we’re adopting and passing down traits that are detrimental to our health. This concept, called dysevolution,

Tenderizing food, especially meat, spared us from some of the effort of digesting and chewing, which saved energy.13 We used this extra energy to grow a larger brain.

The more we cooked, the more soft, calorie-rich food we consumed, the larger our brains grew and the tighter our airways became.

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.

Along the way, the larynx would descend in the throat to accommodate another adaptation: vocal communication.

this lowered larynx became less efficient at its original purpose. It created too much space at the back of the mouth and made early humans susceptible to choking.

The readouts reveal what the previous days have revealed: mouthbreathing is destroying our health.

chronically raised blood pressure, also shared by a third of the U.S. population, can cause heart attacks, stroke, and other serious problems.

Simply training yourself to breathe through your nose, Douillard reported, could cut total exertion in half and offer huge gains in endurance.

the body makes energy from air and food. There are two options: with oxygen, a process known as aerobic respiration, and without it, which is called anaerobic respiration.

Anaerobic energy is generated only with glucose (a simple sugar), and it’s quicker and easier for our bodies to access.

anaerobic energy is inefficient and can be toxic, creating an excess of lactic acid.

why, after we’re warmed up, exercise feels easier. The body has switched from anaerobic to aerobic respiration.

anaerobic energy is like a muscle car—it’s fast and responsive for quick trips, but polluting and impractical for long hauls.

When we run our cells aerobically with oxygen, we gain some 16 times more energy efficiency over anaerobic.9 The key for exercise, and for the rest of life, is to stay in that energy-efficient, clean-burning, oxygen-eating aerobic zone for the vast majority of time during exercise and at all times during rest.

Finding the best heart rate for exercise is easy: subtract your age from 180.11

Inhaling air through the mouth decreases pressure, which causes the soft tissues in the back of the mouth to become loose and flex inward, creating less space and making breathing more difficult.

Inhaling from the nose has the opposite effect. It forces air against all those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and breathing easier. After a while, these tissues and muscles get “toned” to stay in this opened and wide position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal breathing.

Mouthbreathing causes the body to lose 40 percent more water.

You’d think this moisture loss would decrease the need to urinate, but, oddly, the opposite was true.

if the body has inadequate time in deep sleep, as it does when it experiences chronic sleep apnea, vasopressin won’t be secreted normally. The kidneys will release water, which triggers the need to urinate and signals to our brains that we should consume more liquid. We get thirsty, and we need to pee more.

They saw their high blood pressure drop, depression abate, headaches disappear.

Shiva Swarodaya,

scientists have known for more than a century that the nostrils do pulse to their own beat, that they do open and close like flowers throughout the day and night.

(Breathing is easier through the nostril opposite the pillow.)

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. This happens because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness.

Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect: it works as a kind of brake system to the right nostril’s accelerator.

There’s a yoga practice dedicated to manipulating the body’s functions with forced breathing through the nostrils. It’s called nadi shodhana—in Sanskrit, nadi means “channel” and shodhana means “purification”—or, more commonly, alternate nostril breathing.

open. To gain focus and balance the body and mind, I followed a technique called surya bheda pranayama, which involves taking one breath into the right nostril, then exhaling through the left for several rounds.

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.

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.

if I were to endeavor to bequeath to posterity the most important Motto which human language can convey, it should be in three words—SHUT-YOUR-MOUTHfn1 …. Where I would paint and engrave it, in every Nursery, and on every Bed-post in the Universe, its meaning could not be mistaken. “And if obeyed,” he continued, “its importance would soon be realized.”

Just a few minutes of daily bending and breathing can expand lung capacity. With that extra capacity we can expand our lives. The stretches, called the Five Tibetan Rites,