Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

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.6 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. Overall, humans have the sad distinction of being the most plugged-up species on Earth.

When the nasal cavity gets congested, airflow decreases and bacteria flourish. These bacteria replicate and can lead to infections and colds and more congestion.

Oxygen, it turned out, produced 16 times more energy than carbon dioxide.9 Aerobic life forms used this boost to evolve, to leave the sludge-covered rocks behind and grow larger and more complex.

The forward facial growth and large mouths also created wider airways. These people very likely never snored or had sleep apnea or sinusitis or many other chronic respiratory problems that affect modern populations. They did not because they could not. Their mouths were far too large, and their airways too wide for anything to block them.

Evolution doesn’t always mean progress, Evans told me. It means change. And life can change for better or worse. Today, the human body is changing in ways that have nothing to do with the “survival of the fittest.” Instead, we’re adopting and passing down traits that are detrimental to our health. This concept, called dysevolution, was made popular by Harvard biologist Daniel Lieberman, and it explains why our backs ache, feet hurt, and bones are growing more brittle.

Eating this raw diet took a lot of time and effort. So we gathered stones and bashed prey against rocks. 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 smaller sinuses and mouth also reduced space in our throats. The more we cooked, the more soft, calorie-rich food we consumed, the larger our brains grew and the tighter our airways became.20

The big-nosed Neanderthals, the scrawny naledi, the thick-necked heidelbergensis were all killed off by disease, weather, each other, or animals, or laziness, or something else. There was only one human left in the long family tree: us.

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.23, 24

The larynx works as a valve to shuttle food into the stomach and protect us from inhaling it and other objects. Every animal, and every other Homo species, had evolved a higher larynx, located toward the top of the throat. This made sense, since a high larynx functions most efficiently, allowing the body to rid itself quickly should anything get stuck in our airways.

As humans developed speech, the larynx sank, opening up space in the back of the mouth and allowing a wider range of vocalizations and volumes.25,

But 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. We could choke if we swallowed something too big, and we’d choke on smaller objects that were swallowed quickly and sloppily. Sapiens would become the only animals, and the only human species, that could easily choke on food and die.27

Strangely, sadly, the same adaptations that would allow our ancestors to outwit, outmaneuver, and outlive other animals—a mastery of fire and processing food, an enormous brain, and the ability to communicate in a vast range of sounds—would obstruct our mouths and throats and make it much harder for us to breathe. This recessed growth would, much later, make us prone to choke on our own bodies when we slept: to snore.

Every few seconds, the device records my heart rate and blood oxygen levels, using this information to assess how often and how severely my too-deep tongue might get lodged in my too-small mouth and cause me to hold my breath, a condition more commonly known as sleep apnea.

The cycling was Olsson’s idea. He’d spent about ten years researching the differences in performance between nasal breathers and mouthbreathers during intense exercise. He’d conducted his own studies on CrossFit athletes, and he’d worked with coaches. He’d become convinced that mouthbreathing can put the body into a state of stress that can make us more quickly fatigued and sap athletic performance.1

The bike experiment is a repeat of several studies conducted 20 years earlier by Dr. John Douillard, a trainer to elite athletes, from tennis star Billie Jean King to triathletes to the New Jersey Nets. In the 1990s, Douillard became convinced that mouthbreathing was hurting his clients.

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

To understand how and why Douillard’s experiment worked, we first need to understand the ways 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. It’s a kind of backup system and turbo boost when the body doesn’t have enough oxygen.3 But anaerobic energy is inefficient and can be toxic, creating an excess of lactic acid.4 The nausea, muscle weakness, and sweating you experience after you’ve pushed it too hard at the gym is the feeling of anaerobic overload.5 This process explains why the first few minutes of an intense workout are often so miserable. Our lungs and respiratory system haven’t caught up to supply the oxygen our bodies need, and so the body has to use anaerobic respiration. This also explains why, after we’re warmed up, exercise feels easier. The body has switched from anaerobic to aerobic respiration.

These two energies are made in different muscle fibers throughout the body. Because anaerobic respiration is intended as a backup system, our bodies are...

More injuries occur during the post–New Year’s rush to gyms than at any other time of the year, because too many people attempt to exercise far over their thresholds. Essentially, 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.

In the 1970s, Phil Maffetone, a top fitness coach who worked with Olympians, ultramarathoners, and triathletes, discovered that most standardized workouts could be more injurious than beneficial to athletes.10

Finding the best heart rate for exercise is easy: subtract your age from 180.11 The result is the maximum your body can withstand to stay in the aerobic state. Long bouts of training and exercise can happen below this rate but never above it, otherwise the body will risk going too deep into the anaerobic zone for too long.12

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.

Sleeping with an open mouth exacerbates these problems. Whenever we put our heads on a pillow, gravity pulls the soft tissues in the throat and tongue down, closing off the airway even more. After a while, our airways get conditioned to this position; snoring and sleep apnea become the new normal.

Forced mouthbreathing was very likely changing the shape of my airways, just as it did with Harvold’s monkeys. The changes weren’t happening in a matter of months, either, but days.

Whenever oxygen falls below 90 percent, the blood can’t carry enough of it to support body tissues. If this goes on too long, it can lead to heart failure, depression, memory problems, and early death.

Mouthbreathing causes the body to lose 40 percent more water.20

During the deepest, most restful stages of sleep, the pituitary gland, a pea-size ball at the base of the brain, secretes hormones that control the release of adrenaline, endorphins, growth hormone, and other substances, including vasopressin, which communicates with cells to store more water.21, 22 This is how animals can sleep through the night without feeling thirsty or needing to relieve themselves. But 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.

I’d read a report from the Mayo Clinic which found that chronic insomnia, long assumed to be a psychological problem, is often a breathing problem.23

Go to the references for the research

And contrary to what most of us might think, no amount of snoring is normal, and no amount of sleep apnea comes without risks of serious health effects.

Another Japanese study in humans from 2013 found that mouthbreathing delivered a disturbance of oxygen to the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with ADHD. Nasal breathing had no such effects.

They are part of a burgeoning group of pulmonauts exploring novel therapies in breathing, lung expansion, orthodontics, and airway development.

The same thing happened with other patients—both adults and children—who’d regained the ability to breathe properly: their slack-jawed and narrowed faces morphed back into a more natural configuration.33 They saw their high blood pressure drop, depression abate, headaches disappear.

To breathe is to absorb ourselves in what surrounds us, to take in little bits of life, understand them, and give pieces of ourselves back out.

I’ll explore techniques to expand the lungs, develop the diaphragm, flood the body with oxygen, hack the autonomic nervous system, stimulate immune response, and reset chemoreceptors in the brain.

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.

Thirteen hundred years ago, an ancient Tantric text, the Shiva Swarodaya, described how one nostril will open to let breath in as the other will softly close throughout the day.

Still, 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. The phenomenon, called nasal cycles, was first described in 1895 by a German physician named Richard Kayser.5, 6

The interior of the nose, it turned out, is blanketed with erectile tissue, the same flesh that covers the penis, clitoris, and nipples. Noses get erections. Within seconds, they too can engorge with blood and become large and stiff. This happens because the nose is more intimately connected to the genitals than any other organ; when one gets aroused, the other responds.

After Kayser’s discovery, decades passed and nobody offered a good reason for why the human nose was lined with erectile tissue, or why the nostrils cycled.9

There were many theories: some believed this switching provoked the body to flip over from side to side while sleeping to prevent bedsores.10 (Breathing is easier through the nostril opposite the pillow.) Others thought the cycling helped protect the nose from respiratory infection and allergies, while still others argued that alternate airflow allows us to smell odors more efficiently.

If the nose became infected, the nasal cycle became more pronounced and switched back and forth quickly.12

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.

Breathing through the right nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain, specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical decisions, language, and computing.13

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.14 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.15

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.17

There are dozens of alternate nostril breathing techniques.

Only right, only left and combined

Imagine for a moment that you’re holding a billiard ball at eye level a few inches from your face. Then imagine slowly pushing that entire ball inside the center of your face. The volume the ball would take up, some six cubic inches, is equivalent to the total space of all the cavities and passageways that make up the interior of the adult nose.19