Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

Inhaling the gas might increase blood oxygen levels one or two percent, but that oxygen will never make it into our hungry cells. We’ll simply breathe it back out.fn1

“Carbon dioxide is the chief hormone of the entire body; it is the only one that is produced by every tissue and that probably acts on every organ,” Henderson later wrote. “Carbon dioxide is, in fact, a more fundamental component of living matter than is oxygen.”

He inhales and exhales three times slower than the average American, turning those 18 breaths a minute into six. As he sips air in through his nose and out through his mouth, I watch as his carbon dioxide levels rise from 5 percent to 6 percent. They keep rising. A minute later, Olsson’s levels are 25 percent higher than they were just a few minutes ago, taking him from an unhealthy hypocapnic zone to squarely within a medically normal range. All the while, his blood pressure drops about five points and heart rate sinks to the mid-60s. What hasn’t changed is his oxygen. From start to finish, even though he’s been breathing at a third of the rate considered normal, his oxygen hasn’t wavered: it stayed at 97 percent.

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. By taking longer breaths, we allow our lungs to soak up more in fewer breaths.

“If, with training and patience, you can perform the same exercise workload with only 14 breaths per minute instead of 47 using conventional techniques, what reason could there be not to do it?” wrote John Douillard, the trainer who’d conducted the stationary bike experiments in the 1990s. “When you see yourself running faster every day, with your breath rate stable … you will begin to feel the true meaning of the word fitness.”16

I tried to inhale and exhale slower and slower, from my usual exercising rate of 20 breaths a minute to just six. I immediately felt a sense of air hunger and claustrophobia. After a minute or so I looked down at the pulse oximeter to see how much oxygen I was losing, how starved my body had become. But my oxygen hadn’t decreased with these very slow breaths, as I or anyone else might expect. My levels rose.

A last word on slow breathing. It goes by another name: prayer. When Buddhist monks chant their most popular mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, each spoken phrase lasts six seconds, with six seconds to inhale before the chant starts again. The traditional chant of Om, the “sacred sound of the universe” used in Jainism and other traditions, takes six seconds to sing, with a pause of about six seconds to inhale.

Japanese, African, Hawaiian, Native American, Buddhist, Taoist, Christian—these cultures and religions all had somehow developed the same prayer techniques, requiring the same breathing patterns.18 And they all likely benefited from the same calming effect.

In 2001, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy gathered two dozen subjects,

Subjects recited different prayers from different cultures

But what was even more stunning was what breathing like this did to the subjects. Whenever they followed this slow breathing pattern, blood flow to the brain increased and the systems in the body entered a state of coherence, when the functions of heart, circulation, and nervous system are coordinated to peak efficiency.20, 21 The moment the subjects returned to spontaneous breathing or talking, their hearts would beat a little more erratically, and the integration of these systems would slowly fall apart. A few more slow and relaxed breaths, and it would return again.

It turned out that 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.22 This was the same pattern of the rosary.

The results were profound, even when practiced for just five to ten minutes a day.23

Slow breathing (5.5 /min)

He and Gerbarg even used this slow breathing technique to restore the lungs of 9/11 survivors who suffered from a chronic and painful cough caused by the debris, a horrendous condition called ground-glass lungs. There was no known cure for this ailment, and yet after just two months, patients achieved a significant improvement by simply learning to practice a few rounds of slow breathing a day.

Gerbarg and Brown would write books and publish several scientific articles about the restorative power of the slow breathing, which would become known as “resonant breathing” or Coherent Breathing. The technique required no real effort, time, or thoughtfulness.24

In many ways, this resonant breathing offered the same benefits as meditation for people who didn’t want to meditate. Or yoga for people who didn’t like to get off the couch. It offered the healing touch of prayer for people who weren’t religious.

In other words, the meditations, Ave Marias, and dozens of other prayers that had been developed over the past several thousand years weren’t all baseless. Prayer heals, especially when it’s practiced at 5.5 breaths a minute.

One thing that every medical or freelance pulmonaut I’ve talked to over the past several years has agreed on is that, 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. With some effort and training, however, breathing less can become an unconscious habit.

In Japan, legend has it that samurai would test a soldier’s readiness by placing a feather beneath his nostrils while he inhaled and exhaled. If the feather moved, the soldier would be dismissed.

Testing a samurai's readiness

To be clear, breathing less is not the same as breathing slowly. Average adult lungs can hold about four to six liters of air. Which means that, even if we practice slow breathing at 5.5 breaths per minute, we could still be easily taking in twice the air we need. The key to optimum breathing, and all the health, endurance, and longevity benefits that come with it, is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume. To breathe, but to breathe less.

Starving yourself of air can be injurious if it becomes a regular thing, he warned. Ordinarily, we should breathe as closely in line with our needs as we can. But occasionally willing the body to breathe way less, he argued, has some potent benefits just as fasting does. Sometimes it can lead to euphoria.

whenever I jog, I’m fully conscious of the misery and boredom of every second.

Slower, longer exhales, of course, mean higher carbon dioxide levels. With that bonus carbon dioxide, we gain a higher aerobic endurance. This measurement of highest oxygen consumption, called VO2 max, is the best gauge of cardiorespiratory fitness. 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.7

Heart disease, ulcers, and chronic inflammation were all linked to disturbances in circulation, blood pH, and metabolism. How we breathe affects all those functions.

The point of this exercise isn’t to inflict unnecessary pain. It’s to get the body comfortable with higher levels of carbon dioxide, so that we’ll unconsciously breathe less during our resting hours and the next time we work out. So that we’ll release more oxygen, increase our endurance, and better support all the functions in our bodies.

For the past few years, the Soviet government had sent tens of thousands of the finest space engineers, chemists, physicists, and others to live in secrecy among the laboratories. Their job was to develop cutting-edge technologies aimed at ensuring the Soviet Union’s dominance.

Like Bohr and Henderson, Buteyko was fascinated with carbon dioxide, and he too believed that increasing this gas by breathing less could not only keep us fit and healthy. It could heal us as well.

Buteyko developed a protocol based on the breathing habits of these healthiest patients, which he’d later call Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing.13

Counsilman trained his team to hold their breath for as many as nine strokes. He believed that, over time, the swimmers would utilize oxygen more efficiently and swim faster.18 In a sense, it was Buteyko’s Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing and Zátopek hypoventilation—underwater.

Breathing less offered huge benefits. If athletes kept at it for several weeks, their muscles adapted to tolerate more lactate accumulation, which allowed their bodies to pull more energy during states of heavy anaerobic stress, and, as a result, train harder and longer.

Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more energy with each breath.21

Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be us...

Just a few weeks of the training significantly increased endurance, reduced more “trunk fat,” improved cardiovascular function, and boosted muscle mass compared to normal-breathing exercise.23

How hypoventilation is effective in obese people

My little jog proved there’s much to gain from this less approach. At the same time, such extreme training would be useful only for those willing to endure hours of red-faced, sweaty suffering.

Asthma is an immune system sensitivity that provokes constriction and spasms in the airways. Pollutants, dust, viral infections, cold air, and more can all lead to attacks.29

He was convinced that heart disease, hemorrhoids, gout, cancer, and more than 100 other diseases were all caused by carbon dioxide deficiency brought on by overbreathing.

When we breathe too much, we expel too much carbon dioxide, and our blood pH rises to become more alkaline; when we breathe slower and hold in more carbon dioxide, pH lowers and blood becomes more acidic. Almost all cellular functions in the body take place at a blood pH of 7.4, our sweet spot between alkaline and acid. When we stray from that, the body will do whatever it can to get us back there. The kidneys, for instance, will respond to overbreathing by “buffering,”fn4 a process in which an alkaline compound called bicarbonate is released into the urine.

Weeks, months, or years of overbreathing, and this constant kidney (renal) buffering will deplete the body of essential minerals.40, 41 This occurs because as bicarbonate leaves the body, it takes magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and more with it.

Constant buffering also weakens the bones, which try to compensate by dissolving their mineral stores back into the bloodstream. (Yes, it’s possible to overbreathe yourself into osteoporosis and increased risk of bone fractures.)

The techniques they used varied, but all circled around the same premise: to extend the length of time between inhalations and exhalations. The less one breathes, the more one absorbs the warming touch of respiratory efficiency—and the further a body can go. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Nature functions in orders of magnitude. Mammals with the lowest resting heart rates live the longest. And it’s no coincidence that these are consistently the same mammals that breathe the slowest.

“The yogi’s life is not measured by the number of his days, but the number of his breaths,” wrote B. K. S. Iyengar, an Indian yoga teacher who had spent years in bed as a sickly child until he learned yoga and breathed himself back to health.44 He died in 2014, at age 95.

They discovered that the optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters. The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales. This is the perfect breath.

With nowhere to put the dead, Parisian authorities instructed limestone miners to dump them into wagons and wheel them into Paris’s quarries. As new limestone quarries were dug out to build the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, and other great buildings, more bodies went underground.

A group called “cataphiles” have been exploring the nether regions of this place since entering the quarries became illegal in 1955. They’ve found their way down through storm drains, manholes, and secret doorways along Rue Bonaparte. Some cataphiles had built private clubhouses within the limestone walls; others hosted weekly subterranean dance clubs. There was a rumor that a French billionaire chiseled out his own lavish apartment down there and hosted private parties, where guests do who-knows-what. Cataphiles made new discoveries all the time.

All these methods extended the shelf life of foods and made them more accessible to the public. But they also made foods mushy and soft. Sugar, which was once a prized commodity of the wealthy, became increasingly common and cheap.

This new, highly processed diet lacked fiber and the full spectrum of minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and other nutrients. As a result, urban populations would grow sicker and smaller.

Researchers have suspected that industrialized food was shrinking our mouths and destroying our breathing for as long as we’ve been eating this way.

“Since we have known for a long time that savages have excellent teeth and that civilized men have terrible teeth, it seems to me that we have been extraordinarily stupid in concentrating all of our attention upon the task of finding out why all our teeth are so poor, without ever bothering to learn why the savage’s teeth are good,”

Vitamins and minerals, he discovered, work in symbiosis; one needs the others to be effective. This explained why supplements could be useless unless they’re in the presence of other supplements. We needed all these nutrients to develop strong bones throughout the body, especially in the mouth and face.

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.