Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

What directs this rambling path are turbinates, six maze-like bones (three on each side) that begin at the opening of your nostrils and end just below your eyes. The turbinates are coiled in such a way that if you split them apart, they’d look like a seashell, which is how they got their other name, nasal concha, after the conch shell.

the mucus is the body’s “first line of defense.”22 It’s constantly on the move, sweeping along at a rate of about half an inch every minute, more than 60 feet per day. Like a giant conveyor belt, it collects inhaled debris in the nose, then moves all the junk down the throat and into the stomach, where it’s sterilized by stomach acid, delivered to the intestines, and sent out of your body.

This conveyor belt doesn’t just move by itself. It’s pushed along by millions of tiny, hair-like structures called cilia.23 Like a field of wheat in the wind, cilia sway with each inhale and exhale, but do so at a fast clip of up to 16 beats per second.24

No matter what position the nose (and head) is in, whether it’s upside down or right-side up, the cilia will keep pushing inward and down.

Working together, the different areas of the turbinates will heat, clean, slow, and pressurize air so that the lungs can extract more oxygen with each breath.26 This is why nasal breathing is far more healthy and efficient than breathing through the mouth. As Nayak explained when I first met him, the nose is the silent warrior: the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our minds, and weather vane to our emotions.

All these methods trained children to breathe through their noses, all day, every day. It was a habit they would carry with them the rest of their lives.

He wanted to know if “medicinal” breathing practices extended beyond the Plains. They did. Every tribe Catlin visited over the next several years—dozens of them—shared the same breathing habits.

Catlin was not only a chronicler of breathing methods; he was a practitioner. Nasal breathing saved his life.

By his mid-30s, Catlin reported feeling healthier and stronger than at any other time in his life. “I at length completely conquered an insidious enemy that was nightly attacking me in my helpless position, and evidently fast hurrying me to the grave,” he wrote.

George Catlin would live to be 76, about double the average life expectancy at the time.34

Tuberculosis was spread by mouthbreathing at that time

Dr. Mark Burhenne had been studying the links between mouthbreathing and sleep for decades, and had written a book on the subject.36 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.37

“The health benefits of nose breathing are undeniable,” he told me. One of the many benefits is that the sinuses release a huge boost of nitric oxide, a molecule that plays an essential role in increasing circulation and delivering oxygen into cells.40 Immune function, weight, circulation, mood, and sexual function can all be heavily influenced by the amount of nitric oxide in the body.

(The popular erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil, known by the commercial name Viagra, works by releasing nitric oxide into the bloodstream, which opens the capillaries in the genitals and elsewhere.)

Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of the reasons we can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen than b...

Kearney herself had spent years as a mouthbreather due to chronic congestion. She visited an ear, nose, and throat specialist and discovered that her nasal cavities were blocked with tissue. 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.

Like other parts of the body, the nasal cavity responds to whatever inputs it receives. When the nose is denied regular use, it will atrophy. This is what happened to Kearney and many of her patients, and to so much of the general population. Snoring and sleep apnea often follow.

Keeping the nose constantly in use, however, trains the tissues inside the nasal cavity and throat to flex and stay open. Kearney, Burhenne, and so many of their patients healed themselves this way: by breathing from their noses, all day and all night.

“And 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.”

The stretches, called the Five Tibetan Rites, came to the Western world,

Daily bending and stretchin that increases lung capacity

However, the lung-expanding stretches he described are rooted in actual exercises that date back to 500 BCE.2 Tibetans had used these methods for millennia to improve physical fitness, mental health, cardiovascular function, and, of course, extend life.3

More recently, science has begun measuring what the ancient Tibetans understood intuitively. In the 1980s, researchers with the Framingham Study, a 70-year longitudinal research program focused on heart disease, attempted to find out if lung size really did correlate to longevity. They gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity.

Our ability to breathe full breaths was, according to the researchers, “literally a measure of living capacity.”4

The lungs themselves will lose about 12 percent of capacity from the age of 30 to 50, and will continue declining even faster as we get older, with women faring worse than men.

But what the Tibetans have long known and what Western science is now discovering is that 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. Freedivers know this better than anyone.

Moderate exercise like walking or cycling has been shown to boost lung size by up to 15 percent.8

At age 16, Schroth began training herself in something called “orthopedic breathing.” She would stand in front of a mirror, twist her body, and inhale into one lung while limiting air intake to the other. Then she’d hobble over to a table, sling her body on its side, and arch her chest back and forth to loosen her rib cage while breathing into the empty space. Schroth spent five years doing this. At the end, she’d effectively cured herself of “incurable” scoliosis; she’d breathed her spine straight again.

“What the bodily form depends on is breath (chi) and what breath relies upon is form,” states a Chinese adage from 700 AD. “When the breath is perfect, the form is perfect (too).”

The subject of intrigue was Carl Stough, a choir conductor and medical anomaly who got his start in the 1940s.

Stough broke all the rules; he expanded lungs and extended life spans. And yet, most people today have never heard of him.

What Stough had discovered, and what Martin had learned, was that the most important aspect of breathing wasn’t just to take in air through the nose. Inhaling was the easy part. The key to breathing, lung expansion, and the long life that came with it was on the other end of respiration. It was in the transformative power of a full exhalation.

Normally, the blood coursing through our arteries and veins at any one time does a full circuit once a minute, an average of 2,000 gallons of blood a day.13, 14 This regular and consistent blood flow is essential to delivering fresh oxygenated blood to cells and removing waste. What influences much of the speed and strength of this circulation is the thoracic pump, the name for the pressure that builds inside the chest when we breathe. 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.

The diaphragm lifts during exhalations, which shrinks the lungs, then it drops back down to expand them during inhalations.

A 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.15

Stough hadn’t found a way to reverse emphysema. Lung damage from the disease is permanent. What he’d done is find a way to access the rest of the lungs, the areas that were still functioning, and engage them on a larger level.

The benefits of breathing, of harnessing the art of exhalation, Stough found, extended not just to the chronically sick or to singers, but to everyone.

Our bodies can survive on short and clipped breaths for decades, and many of us do. That doesn’t mean it’s good for us. Over time, shallow breathing will limit the range of our diaphragms and lung capacity and can lead to the high-shouldered, chest-out, neck-extended posture common in those with emphysema, asthma, and other respiratory problems.17

The point was to get the diaphragm accustomed to this wider range so that deep and easy breathing became unconscious.

This is the feeling of what Stough called “Breathing Coordination,” when the respiratory and circulatory systems enter a state of equilibrium, when the amount of air that enters us equals the amount that leaves, and our bodies are able perform all their essential functions with the least exertion.

Read previous paragraph for the exercise

He warned them to never hold their breath when positioned at the starting line at the beginning of a race, but to breathe deeply and calmly and always exhale at the sound of the starter pistol. This way, the first breath they’d take in would be rich and full and provide them with energy to run faster and longer.

Olsson claimed that we have 100 times more carbon dioxide in our bodies than oxygen (which is true), and that most of us need even more of it (also true).1 He said it wasn’t just oxygen but huge quantities of carbon dioxide that fostered the burst of life during the Cambrian Explosion 500 million years ago. He said that, today, humans can increase this toxic gas in our bodies and sharpen our minds, burn fat, and, in some cases, heal disease.

What many of these doctors found, and what Olsson would discover much later, was that 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.

Each breath you take must first travel down the throat, past a crossroads called the tracheal carina, which splits it into the right and left lungs. As it keeps going, that breath gets pushed into smaller tubes called the bronchioles until it dead-ends at 500 million little bulbs called the alveoli.

Read next paragraph for the analogy

Blood will grow darker as oxygen leaves.5 The blood in the veins will appear more blueish (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.

Inside each of our 25 trillion red blood cells are 270 million hemoglobin, each of which has room for four oxygen molecules. That’s a billion molecules of oxygen boarding and disembarking within each red blood cell cruise ship.

That carbon dioxide in every exhale has weight, and we exhale more weight than we inhale.

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.

What our bodies really want, what they require to function properly, isn’t faster or deeper breaths. It’s not more air. What we need is more carbon dioxide.

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.9 This discovery explained why certain muscles used during exercise received more oxygen than lesser-used muscles.10 They were producing more carbon dioxide, which attracted more oxygen. It was supply on demand, at a molecular level.

Meanwhile, 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.

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.