Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

It was the constant stress of chewing that was lacking from our diets—not vitamin A, B, C, or D. Ninety-five percent of the modern, processed diet was soft. Even what’s considered healthy food today—smoothies, nut butters, oatmeal, avocados, whole wheat bread, vegetable soups. It’s all soft.

What looked like human progress—all that milling, mass distribution, and preservation of food—had horrible consequences.

Should I, or anyone else, develop a chronic mild nasal obstruction at any point in the future, Nayak first recommended a “Drano” approach in the form of a saline nasal rinse, sometimes with a low-dose steroid spray, a treatment that costs next to nothing and can be self-administered.

He has also prescribed a topical rinse spiked with higher-dose steroids for patients on the path to reconstructive nasal surgery and found that 5 to 10 percent of patients no longer felt the need for further treatment.

Sometimes the nostrils are the problem, not the sinuses. Nostrils that are too small or that collapse too easily during an inhale can inhibit the free flow of air and contribute to breathing problems. This condition is so common that researchers have an official name for it, “nasal valve collapse,” and an official measurement, called the Cottle’s maneuver.

Many people with this condition receive minimally invasive surgery, or use adhesive strips called Breathe Right or nasal dilator cones.

About three-quarters of modern humans have a deviated septum clearly visible to the naked eye, which means the bone and cartilage that separate the right and left airways of the nose are off center.

Surgery is highly effective in straightening or reducing these structures, but Nayak warned that it needs to be done carefully and conservatively. The nose, after all, is a wondrous, ornate organ whose structures work as a tightly controlled system.

If surgeons drill out or remove too much tissue, especially the turbinates, the nose can’t effectively filter, humidify, clean, or even sense inhaled air. For this small and unfortunate group of patients, each breath comes in too quickly, a hideous condition called empty nose syndrome.

The more they breathed, the more out of breath they felt. Their doctors, families, and friends couldn’t understand. Having access to more air, more quickly, could only be an advantage, they said. But we know now that the opposite is more often true.

The number of patients complaining of breathing difficulties after more minor procedures is certainly far lower, but even if they represented 1 percent of 1 percent, the empty nose stories spooked me enough to explore other options before I ever went under the knife to fix my obstructed breathing.

Weight lifters frequently deal with sleep apnea and chronic breathing problems; instead of layers of fat, they have muscles crowding the airways.

Hundreds of leading orthodontists and dentists have come out in support of Mew’s position, saying that, yes, traditional orthodontics were making breathing worse in half their patients.

“In ten years, nobody will be using traditional orthodontics,” Gelb told me. “We’ll look back at what we’ve done and be horrified.” This is what Mew had been saying for the past half century.

He explained that the first step to improving airway obstruction wasn’t orthodontics but instead involved maintaining correct “oral posture.” Anyone could do this, and it was free.

It just meant holding the lips together, teeth lightly touching, with your tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck.

When sitting or standing, the spine should form a J-shape—perfectly straight until it reaches the small of the back, ...

While maintaining this posture, we should always breathe slowly through the...

The more time infants spent chewing and sucking, the more developed their faces and airways would become, and the better they’d breathe later in life.

They’ve shown lower incidence of crooked teeth and snoring and sleep apnea in infants who were breastfed longer over those who were bottle-fed.54

James Sim Wallace, a renowned Scottish doctor and dentist, published several books about the deleterious effects of soft foods on our mouths and breathing. “An early soft diet prevents the development of the muscle fibers of the tongue,”

“That the human jaw is gradually becoming smaller is a fact which is universally recognized,” Wallace noted.

People, pigs, whatever. Whenever they switched from harder foods to soft foods, faces would narrow, teeth would crowd, jaws would fall out of alignment. Breathing problems would often follow.

Today, the official website of the U.S. National Institutes of Health attributes the causes of crooked teeth and other deformations of the airway “most often to heredity.” Other causes include thumb-sucking, injury, or “tumors of the mouth and jaw.” There is no mention of chewing; no mention of food at all.

Breathing is a power switch to a vast network called the autonomic nervous system.

The first, called the parasympathetic nervous system, stimulates relaxation and restoration.

The lungs are covered with nerves that extend to both sides of the autonomic nervous system, and many of the nerves connecting to the parasympathetic system are located in the lower lobes, which is one reason long and slow breaths are so relaxing.

As molecules of breath descend deeper, they switch on parasympathetic nerves, which send more messages for the organs to rest and digest.

As air ascends through the lungs during exhalation, the molecules stimulate an even more powerf...

The deeper and more softly we breathe in, and the longer we exhale, the more slowly the heart bea...

The second half of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic, has an opposite role.6 It sends stimulating signals to our organs, telling them to get ready for action.

A profusion of the nerves to this system are spread out at the top of the lungs. When we take short, hasty breaths, the molecules of air switch on the sympathetic nerves.

In these states, the body redirects blood flow from less-vital organs like the stomach and bladder and sends it to the muscles and brain.

Heart rate increases, adrenaline kicks in, blood vessels constrict, pupils dilate, palms sweat, the mind sharpens.7, 8

Sympathetic states help ease pain and keep blood from draining out if we get injured. They make us meaner and leaner, so we can fight harder or...

But our bodies are built to stay in a state of heightened sympathetic alert only for short bu...

Although sympathetic stress takes just a second to activate, turning it off and returning to a state of relaxation and rest...

reminds me that the stress I’m creating is different from the stress of, say, running late for an important meeting. It is conscious stress.

Professional surfers, mixed martial arts fighters, and Navy SEALs use Tummo-style breathing to get into the zone before a competition or black ops mission.

It’s also especially useful for middle-aged people who suffer from lower-grade stress, aches and pains, and slowing metabolisms.

The vagus nerve is the power lever; it’s what turns organs on and off in response to stress.

When perceived stress level is very high, the vagus nerve slows heart rate, circulation, and organ functions.

Breathing is an autonomic function we can consciously control. While we can’t simply decide when to slow or speed up our heart or digestion, or to move blood from one organ to another, we can choose how and when to breathe.

Willing ourselves to breathe slowly will open up communication along the vagal network and relax us into a parasympathetic state.

Breathing really fast and heavy on purpose flips the vagal response the other way, shoving us into a stressed state.

It teaches us to consciously access the autonomic nervous system and control it, to turn on heavy stress specifically so that we can turn it off and spend the rest of our days and nights relaxing and restoring, feeding and breeding.

This practice of heavy breathing along with regular cold exposure was later discovered to release the stress hormones adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine on command.

The burst of adrenaline gave heavy breathers energy and released a battery of immune cells programmed to heal wounds, fight off pathogens and infection.

The huge spike in cortisol helped downgrade short-term inflammatory immune responses, while a squirt of norepinephrine redirected blood flow from the skin, stomach, and reproductive organs to muscles, the b...

Autoimmune diseases have no known cure, and even the causes are debated. An increasing body of research has shown that many are tied to dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system.