“In transporting the breath, the inhalation must be full. 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 Inscription
The above quote is one of the first things you see when cracking open Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor.
I became interested in breathwork through the practices of yoga. Yoga has 8 limbs, and only one of them is about postures (asana) – which is what Western Yoga tends to focus on. Pranayama – or breathwork – is another one of the 8 limbs of yoga. Qigong also has very similar breathing practices.
Through the book, I learned that Tibetan Buddhist monks practice a technique called Tummo, which is similar to what Wim Hof practices. Seven books of the Chinese Tao dating back to around 400 BCE focus entirely on breathing. Monks reportedly are able to melt circles in the snow around their bare bodies.
Breathwork, it seems, is a pretty big deal in many ancient traditions.
According to the author James Nestor, breathwork in general brings a multitude of benefits:
- Improves athletic performance
- Increases weight loss
- Can halt snoring and sleep apnea
- Can prevent disease, anxiety, stress, and depression (some people have even put their cancer into remission)
- Elevates our consciousness and awareness in meditation (I.e., deepens meditative absorption)
- Increases our sense of joy and peace (which helps us create a positive impact on the world around us)
So obviously I was interested in learning about breathwork in depth!
But is proper breathing really a life or death issue, like the quote at the top says? After reading the book, I would say yes!
Research shows that 90 percent of us is breathing incorrectly and that is causing a laundry list of chronic diseases. Many modern illnesses – asthma, anxiety, ADHD, psoriasis, and more – could either be reduced or reversed simply by changing the way we breathe.
So I wanted to write a book review and summary, to share the best insights from the book.
If you enjoy the summary, I highly recommend you buy the book to go more in depth, and have it on hand for future reference!
In some cases, I will include only direct quotes from the book without any commentary on my own. Many times the quotes are mind-blowing all on their own, and don’t need any further explanation.
Contents:
Chapter 1: The Worst Breathers in the Animal Kingdom
Chapter 2: Mouthbreathing
Chapter 3: Nose
Chapter 4: Exhale
Chapter 5: Slow
Chapter 6: Less
Chapter 7: Chew
Chapter 8: More, on Occasion
Chapter 9: Hold It
Chapter 10: Fast, Slow, and Not at All
List of Breathing Methods
Chapter 1: The Worst Breathers in the Animal Kingdom
- Oxygen produces 16 times more energy than carbon dioxide
- Humans dys-evolved to grow bigger brains at the expense of smaller mouths, jawbones, and airways, causing a variety of respiratory problems (including sleep apnea)
Chapter 2: Mouthbreathing
- Mouthbreathing is a major cause of nasal obstruction, which also leads to more snoring and sleep apnea (which can be deadly)
- Mouthbreathing causes the body to lose 40 percent more water
- Mouthbreathing makes you less intelligent by decreasing brain cells and processing speed
“The breath inhaled through the mouth is called ‘Ni Ch’i, adverse breath’, which is extremely harmful. Be careful not to have the breath inhaled through the mouth.”
The Tao
Chapter 3: Nose
- The nose is crucial because it clears air, heats it, and moistens it for easier absorption. It does this through turbinates, which are six seashell-shaped bones in the nostrils.
- The nose filters out particles and pollutants via mucus, our body’s first line of defense. Mucus moves along like a giant conveyor belt at more than 60 feet per day, driven by tiny, hair-like structures called cilia. This conveyor belt collects inhaled debris, 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.
- The nose has a role in erectile dysfunction, lowering blood pressure, easing digestion, responds to stages of the woman’s menstrual cycle, regulating heart rate, opening vessels in our toes, and storing memories
- The nostrils go through nasal cycles, where one nostril quickly congests and the other one opens, which switches every 30 minutes to 4 hours
- These nasal cycles are driven partly by sexual urges, and the interior of the nose is blanketed with the same erectile tissue that covers the penis, clitoris, and nipples (noses get erections)
- The nose is more intimately connected to the genitalia than any other organ
- Nasal cycles and nasal tissue mirrors our state of health. Tissue becomes inflamed during sickness or other states of imbalance. If the nose becomes infected, the nasal cycle becomes more pronounced and switches back and forth more quickly.
- The right and left nasal cavities work like an HVAC system, controlling temperature and blood pressure and feeding the brain chemicals to alter our moods, emotions, and sleep states
- 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 nostril activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness. The right nostril also feeds more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with logical decisions, language, and computing.
- Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect, acting as a brake for the body’s nervous system. 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. The left nostril also increase blood flow to the right side of the brain, which influences creative thought, the formation of mental abstractions, and the production of negative emotions.
- The effects of the left and right nostril can be gamed. There is a yoga practice dedicated to manipulating the body’s functions with forced breathing through the nostrils. It’s called nadi shodhana (meaning “channel purification” in Sanskrit, also called alternate nostril breathing).
- You can also simply breathe in through only the right nostril when you’d like to increase circulation, energy, and digestion. Then you can breathe only through the left nostril when you’d to relax and relieve anxiety.
- The sinuses release a huge boost of nitric oxide, a molecule that plays an essential role in increasing circulation and delivering oxygen into cells. Immune function, weight, circulation, mood, and sexual function can all be heavily influenced by the amount of nitric oxide in the body. Viagra also works by releasing nitric oxide.
- Humming increases the release of nitric oxide in the nasal passages 15-fold
Chapter 4: Exhale
- Just a few minutes of daily stretching and breathing (particularly through the Five Tibetan Rites) can expand lung capacity. With that extra capacity we can expand our lives, and can even reverse balding.
- A 70-year study 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.
- 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.
Chapter 5: Slow
- 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
- Humans can increase this toxic gas in our bodies and sharpen our minds, burn fat, and, in some cases, heal disease
- For every ten pounds of fat lost in our bodies, eight and a half pounds of it comes out through the lungs. The lungs are the weight-regulating system of the body.
- Whether we breathe thirty times or five times a minute, a healthy body will always have enough oxygen
- 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.
- The more carbon dioxide we have in our blood, the more oxygen gets released from hemoglobin.
- Carbon dioxide has a profound dilating effect on blood vessels, opening these pathways so they could carry more oxygen-rich blood to hungry cells
- Rapid and panicked breaths purge carbon dioxide. Just a few moments of heavy breathing above metabolic needs could cause reduced blood flow to muscles, tissues, and organs.
- For a healthy body, overbreathing or inhaling pure oxygen (like football players or travelers do) has 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.
- Increasing the length of your exhale helps you absorb more oxygen with less breaths, increasing your athletic performance (increasing VO2 capacity)
- The most efficient breathing rhythm – the “perfect breath” – is when the inhale and exhale are symmetrical, taking 5.5 seconds each, which is 5.5 breaths a minute
- This 5.5 second breath is the same length as prayer in many traditions – the Om Mani Padme Hum mantra in Buddhism, the “sacred sound of the universe” Om in Hinduism and Jainism, the sa ta na ma manatra in Kundalini yoga, the rosary in Catholicism, as well as African, Hawaiian, Native American, Buddhist, Taoist and Christian prayer
- Breathing at 5.5 seconds increases blood flow to the brain and systems in the body entered a state of coherence, when the functions of heart, circulation, and nervous system are coordinated to peak efficiency (personal note: This is the same as the technique and science of heart coherence, as taught by the Heartmath Institute and Dr. Joe Dispenza)
- In many ways, slow breathing offers 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 offers the healing touch of prayer for people who weren’t religious.
Chapter 6: Less
- Just as we’ve become a culture of overeaters, we’ve also become a culture of overbreathers. Up to a quarter of the modern population suffers from more serious chronic overbreathing.
- The fix is easy: breathe less
- But 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
- We can do this primarily by extending our exhales
- Slower, longer exhales mean higher carbon dioxide levels, which increase aerobic endurance (VO2 max). Training the body to breathe less actually increases VO2 max, which can not only boost ahtletic stamina but also help us live longer and healthier lives)
- More athletic forms of breath restriction can be called hypoventilation, hypoxic training, Buteyko technique, and normobaric hypoxia training (all create a profound boost in performance, not just for athletes)
- Just a few weeks of breath restriction significantly increased endurance, reduced more “trunk fat”, improved cardiovascular function, and boosted muscle mass
- Pulmonologist Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko – the godfather of restricted breathing – contended that heart disease, hemorrhoids, gout, cancer, and more than 100 other diseases were all caused by carbon dioxide deficiency brought on by overbreathing (he also experienced increased intuition and other forms of extrasensory perception)
- Evidence suggests that even asthma is caused primarily by overbreathing, where breathing less can predictably improve symptoms
Chapter 7: Chew
- As softer, processed food developed, the need to chew our food lessened, which has been shrinking our mouths, airways, and jaws, decreasing our ability to breathe properly
- Chewing properly actually signals our body to build new bone in our mouths, face and airways, improving respiration
- Bone growth can be triggered by chewing whole foods or chewing gum
- The lower our uvula is in our mouths, the greater our chance for sleep apnea and breathing difficulty (which can also be caused by a small mouth and weight gain)
- The earliest orthodontic devices weren’t intended to straighten teeth, but to widen the mouth and open airways
Chapter 8: More, on Occasion
- 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 nervous system are located in the lower lobes, which is one reason long and slow breaths are so relaxing
- The top of the lungs are connected to the sympathetic nervous system. So the more we take shallow and hasty breaths, the more stressed and anxious we become
- Although sympathetic stress takes just a second to activate, turning it off and returning to a state of relaxation and restoration can take an hour or more. It’s what makes food difficult to digest after an accident, and why men have trouble getting erections and women often can’t experience orgasms when they’re angry.
- Stress-inducing breathing techniques like Tummo (inner fire) temporarily induces stress in order to increase metabolism, reduce stress in the long-term, restore a frayed nervous system, and relieve aches and pains
- Many maladies like tingling in fingers, chronic diarrhea, rapid heart rate, diabetes and erectile dysfunction are not caused by malfunctioning organs, but communciation problems along the vagal and autonomic network, brought on by chronic stress. More breathing, on occasion, can restore these systems.
- To some researchers, it’s no coincidence that eight of the top ten most common cancers affect organs cut off from normal blood flow during extended states of stress
- 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
- Whenever the body is forced to take in more air than it needs, we’ll exhale too much carbon dioxide, which will narrow the blood vessels and decrease circulation, especially in the brain. With just a few minutes, or even seconds, of overbreathing, brain blood flow can decrease by 40 percent!
Chapter 9: Hold It
- We need carbon dioxide much more than we think
- The amygdalae is the part of the brain responsible for our fear response. Most anxiety is caused by fear (fear of crowds, fear of losing control), so anxiety is caused by an overreactive amygdalae
- Much of our anxiety is caused by poor breathing
- When we take shallow, short breaths, that increases carbon dioxide in our bodies, which causes our chemoreceptors to think we’re dying, making us anxious. But if we train our chemoreceptors to be ok with higher carbon dioxide levels by holding our breath (and breathe properly in general), we can decrease our anxiety.
- Up to 80 percent of office workers suffer from continuous partial attention. When we do so many small tasks in a short period of time, we become distracted and our breathing becomes shallow and erratic. This has been called “email apnea” and can contribute to actual sleep apnea. At the very least it creates anxiety, stress, and can cause disease.
- Exposing the body to carbon dioxide increases oxygen delivery to muscles, organs, brain, and more; it dilates arteries to increase blood flow, helps dissolve more fat, and is a powerful treatment for dozens of ailments, including asthma, strokes, pneumonia, anxiety, epilepsy and schizophrenia
- Fire departments in New York, Chicago, and other major cities have carbon dioxide tanks installed on their trucks to help save lives
- Those with the worst anxieties consistently suffer from the worst breathing habits
- People with anorexia or panic or obsessive-compulsive disorders consistently have low carbon dioxide levels and a much greater fear of holding their breath. To avoid another attack, they breathe far too much and eventually become hypersensitized to carbon dioxide and panic if they sense a rise in this gas. They are anxious because they’re overbreathing, overbreathing because they are anxious.
- Panic, like asthma, is usually preceded by an increase in breathing volume and rate and a decrease in carbon dioxide
- Breathing less, holding and slowing your breath can prevent asthma attacks, anxiety and other issues
Chapter 10: Fast, Slow, and Not at All
- Cancer develops and thrives in environments of low oxygen, making it critical to breathe properly to not only get ample oxygen, but ample carbon dioxide so our blood vessels can transport oxygen to all of our cells
Epilogue
“If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe better.”
Dr. Andrew Weil“More than sixty years of research on living systems has convinced me that our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailments suggests. Its shortcomings are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it.”
Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi
- Nine out of ten of the top killers, such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke are caused by the food we eat, water we drink , houses we live in, and offices we work in. They are diseases humanity created.
- BreathIQ is a portable device that measures nitric oxide, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and other chemicals in exhaled breath
- Google has an app that pops up automatically when you search the words “breathing exercise”. It trains visitors to inhale and exhale very 5.5 seconds (the “perfect breath”)
List of Breathing Methods
Check out James Nestor’s website for a full list of breathing methods mentioned in his book!
