Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

In transporting the breath, the inhalation must be full.1 When it is full, it has big capacity. When it has big capacity, it can be extended. When it is extended, it can penetrate downward. When it penetrates downward, it will become calmly settled. When it is calmly settled, it will be strong and firm. When it is strong and firm, it will germinate. When it germinates, it will grow. When it grows, it will retreat upward. When it retreats upward, it will reach the top of the head. The secret power of Providence moves above. The secret power of the Earth moves below. He who follows this will live. He who acts against this will die. —500 BCE ZHOU DYNASTY STONE

a fever. I told her I felt perfectly fine. Then she said something about the body’s heat, and how each inhaled breath provides us with new energy and each exhale releases old, stale energy. I tried to take it in but was having trouble focusing.

“There are as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat,” said one female instructor who had held her breath for more than eight minutes and once dived below 300 feet.

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

will take the average reader about 10,000 breaths to read from here to the end of the book.

When the nasal cavity gets congested, airflow decreases and bacteria flourish.

Oxygen, it turned out, produced 16 times more energy than carbon dioxide.

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.

If you could take a Homo erectus, dress him in a Brooks Brothers suit, and put him on a subway, he probably wouldn’t draw a second glance.

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.

Sapiens would become the only animals, and the only human species, that could easily choke on food and die.27

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

There are two options: with oxygen, a process known as aerobic respiration, and without it, which is called anaerobic respiration.

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

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.

another thing that kept happening to me. Mouthbreathing causes the body to lose 40 percent more water.

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

Mouthbreathing was also making me dumber.26 A recent Japanese study showed that rats who had their nostrils obstructed and were forced to breathe through their mouths developed fewer brain cells and took twice as long to make their way through a maze than nasal-breathing controls.

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.

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

There are dozens of alternate nostril breathing techniques. I’ve started with the most basic. It involves placing an index finger over the left nostril and then inhaling and exhaling only through the right. I did this two dozen times after each meal today, to heat up my body and aid my digestion.18 Before meals, and any other time I wanted to relax, I’d switch sides, repeating the same exercise with my left nostril open.

a single breath, more molecules of air will pass through your nose than all the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches—trillions and trillions of them.

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.

“The air which enters the lungs is as different from that which enters the nostrils as distilled water is different from the water in an ordinary cistern or a frog-pond,” he wrote.

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.

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

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

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).

you lined up all the tubes in the airways of your body, they’d reach from New York City to Key West—more than 1,500 miles.3

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.

What’s less acknowledged is the role carbon dioxide plays in weight loss. That carbon dioxide in every exhale has weight, and we exhale more weight than we inhale. And the way the body loses weight isn’t through profusely sweating or “burning it off.”6 We lose weight through exhaled breath.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

I realized then that breathing was like rowing a boat: taking a zillion short and stilted strokes will get you where you’re going, but they pale in comparison to the efficiency and speed of fewer, longer strokes.

A last word on slow breathing. It goes by another name: prayer.

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.

Prayer heals, especially when it’s practiced at 5.5 breaths a minute.

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.

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

“One can avoid cancer by cutting it out,” Buteyko would later say. “But you can’t avoid hypertension.” The best he could do for his patients, and himself, was to try to numb the symptoms. As the story goes, one

What if overbreathing wasn’t the result of hypertension and headaches but the cause? Buteyko wondered. Heart disease, ulcers, and chronic inflammation were all linked to disturbances in circulation, blood pH, and metabolism. How we breathe affects all those functions. Breathing just 20 percent, or even 10 percent more than the body’s needs could overwork our systems. Eventually, they’d weaken and falter. Was breathing too much making people sick, and keeping them that way?

return to my more manageable practice, inhaling for two steps and exhaling for five, a pattern competitive cyclists use. This isn’t exactly comfortable, but it’s tolerable.

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.

Mammals with the lowest resting heart rates live the longest.

yogi’s life is not measured by the number of his days, but the number of his breaths,”

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.