If You Breathe Like This, Don’t Ignore It- It’s Costing You Your Sleep, Brain & Health: James Nestor

0:00 I wonder if we could start off by addressing the skeptic.

0:03 The person who thinks what's the big deal with breathing and breath work?

0:08 You know, I'm alive, I'm breathing.

0:09 Why should I care how slow my breathing is, how deep my breathing is?

0:15 Why will that help me improve the quality of my life?

0:19 By nature, I am a skeptic.

0:21 That's what I'm paid to do as a journalist.

0:23 So, I went into the subject not believing

0:27 anything that I ended up researching and writing about.

0:30 But, what's so easy about breathing is

0:33 you can feel the effects almost instantly.

0:37 After a few seconds, you can feel the effects.

0:39 And if you think what you're feeling is a placebo effect,

0:43 all you have to do is hook yourself up

0:46 to a blood pressure cuff or a heart rate variability real-time monitor,

0:52 and you can see in real time

0:55 how changing your breathing changes your nervous system,

0:58 changes your oxygenation, changes your heart rate, and so much more.

1:03 And that's what convinced me is was being in a lab and changing my breathing

1:07 in five different ways and seeing the transformative

1:10 effect it had on my body and my brain.

1:13 Yeah.

1:14 And I do understand where skepticism comes

1:18 from because we can all breathe, right?

1:21 If someone's listening to this podcast right now, they're breathing, right?

1:24 So, that's not really up for debate, is it?

1:27 It's basically how are you breathing?

1:30 Yeah.

1:30 Well, I think I've heard that a few times of like we we can all breathe.

1:35 What what's the issue?

1:36 We can all eat.

1:38 We can all sleep.

1:39 That doesn't mean you're sleeping well.

1:41 That doesn't mean you're eating well.

1:42 So, you can eat junk food, ultra-processed foods, and that can keep you alive.

1:47 That allows you enough energy to get by to the next day.

1:51 You can sleep hypothetically 3 to 4 hours a night, and you will be alive,

1:56 but that doesn't mean you're doing well,

1:58 and that doesn't mean you're being healthy.

2:00 And we found the exact same thing happens with breathing.

2:04 People are locked into these dysfunctional habits that they think are normal.

2:10 And they don't realize that how they are breathing is

2:13 directly affecting the level of migraines or headaches they get.

2:18 It's affecting their blood pressure.

2:20 For some people with sleep apnea and sleep disordered breathing,

2:22 it's affecting their risk of diabetes and heart disease later on in life.

2:27 So, we know all this.

2:28 I'm not making this up.

2:29 These aren't hypotheses.

2:30 These are scientific facts.

2:32 Yeah, it's interesting as a medical doctor, Mhm.

2:37 we're not really taught that much about the breath.

2:42 Certainly, the things you write about in your book,

2:45 we're not really taught about these things.

2:46 You know, we we think about

2:48 oxygen saturations dropping if someone's severely ill.

2:52 They've got a pneumonia, they're struggling to breathe,

2:54 they've got emphysema, whatever it might be, we're going to look at their oxygen

2:58 saturations and their respiratory rates at that point.

3:02 But, that I guess is reflective of where modern medicine is today, right?

3:08 We we sort of are very good at managing disease.

3:12 Mhm.

3:13 I guess we're less good on the creation of health.

3:16 A pulmonologist is solely interested that you are breathing.

3:22 So, a pulmonologist makes sure that you are breathing.

3:26 They're not [snorts] looking at how you are breathing.

3:29 And you know, if you look at what pulmonology does,

3:33 they're looking at lung cancers, that you get in a car accident,

3:37 they're they're restoring the lungs so that you can breathe.

3:41 I asked this pulmonologist, I said, "Well,

3:43 when a patient comes in and is breathing dysfunctionally, what do you do?

3:46 What's your go-to technique?" And he looked at me like I was crazy.

3:50 He's like, "I don't teach breath work.

3:52 That's not something I do." I said, "But, your discipline is the lungs.

3:56 That's your lane." He said,

3:58 "Because I'm just concerned that that people are breathing.

4:01 And if you come to the emergency room or you come

4:04 to his office and you can't breathe, he can help you.

4:08 If you come with a mild chronic uh breathing respiratory condition,

4:14 it's much harder for them to help you.

4:16 So, I've heard this from sleep medicine as well

4:18 as pulmonologists that they deal with the walking dead, right?

4:22 You have to be so bad in order to get their attention and care.

4:25 And then they're really good at what they do

4:27 to help someone in a car accident with lung cancer, right?

4:30 To to restore that ability to breathe, not how to breathe.

4:35 It's interesting when we think about how we might

4:38 utilize breath work in our lives to improve our health,

4:43 how we feel, our energy, through a medical lens,

4:47 people will think about that as prevention, right?

4:49 They'll they'll say, "Yeah, if I can improve this aspect of my physiology,

4:56 that will help me reduce the chances of me

4:58 getting sick in the future." Which is absolutely true,

5:01 and we're going to talk about that.

5:04 But, as you demonstrate in your book, it's not just prevention.

5:08 You can also treat certain people who

5:11 have got certain conditions by utilizing the breath.

5:14 You mentioned high blood pressure before.

5:17 I think you know, in the book you talk about asthma, right?

5:21 I mean, perhaps we could start with asthma because asthma is very very common.

5:25 And of course, modern medicine has life-saving drugs, you know,

5:29 because if your airways are tight and you can't breathe,

5:32 those inhalers that we give you will open up

5:36 your airways and allow you to get oxygen into your body.

5:40 So, no one's denying that, but I guess the case you're putting forward is

5:44 that there might be another way or an additional

5:47 way that we could approach these problems.

5:49 I think that as a filter, as a journalist,

5:52 my job is to go out into the world and talk

5:54 to the top researchers and look at the real data.

5:57 So, I didn't know anything about asthma.

5:59 I had always considered that asthma was an incurable disease.

6:03 And that's what it's called, an incurable disease.

6:05 A friend of mine, he's actually my accountant,

6:07 has a 3-year-old kid, was having a bunch of breathing troubles.

6:11 They brought him into the doctor, and the doctor said, "Your kid has asthma.

6:15 These are the drugs.

6:16 Your kid is going to be an asthmatic the rest of their life,

6:20 and they're going to get more severe as asthma

6:22 as they age." And then left them there with that.

6:26 And I think that's really irresponsible because if you look at the data,

6:30 and if you look at the research, so many kids with asthma are mouth breathers,

6:35 they're over breathing,

6:37 and these dysfunctional breathing habits either directly contribute

6:41 to their symptoms or in some cases cause the asthma attack.

6:46 And I have heard this over and over again of people who

6:50 were basically left to be on their own with asthma their whole lives,

6:54 don't leave the house, you know,

6:56 when it's hot out or there's too many allergens in the air.

6:59 And yet, if you could take control of your breathing,

7:03 we know this, you can reduce the symptoms,

7:06 and in some cases, you can resolve them completely.

7:10 This is what Patrick McKeown has spent the past 25 years doing.

7:14 And people who think that this is some

7:17 quackery that's that's been uh promoted on Instagram

7:20 should look at the scientific record and talk

7:22 to these people that have reversed their symptoms.

7:25 There's real passion here, James.

7:27 You spoke about this idea that asthma is

7:31 often taught to be a chronic irreversible disease.

7:36 You could apply the same rationale to type 2 diabetes.

7:41 It wasn't that long ago where we were

7:44 taught type 2 diabetes is chronic and irreversible.

7:47 And you know, I've been helping people put

7:49 their type 2 diabetes into remission since probably 2010.

7:52 But, when I first did it on primetime television with a patient back in 2014,

7:58 it was deemed controversial.

8:00 People were like, "That's not real.

8:02 I might No, no, we're we're literally showing you what has happened,

8:05 you know, the camera's actually documenting this entire journey.

8:09 Yes, it's one person, sure.

8:11 But, the fact that actually this is possible should

8:15 at least make us question our assumption that this is irreversible.

8:19 You can say the same thing with asthma.

8:21 It And And I think this nuance often gets lost.

8:24 You're not saying that inhalers have no role.

8:28 I think what you're saying is, "Yes, they do,

8:31 and why don't we also try and look at the way you breathe?

8:35 And if we can, you know, experiment,

8:38 get you breathing more from your nose than your mouth,

8:40 get you using your diaphragm more than your chest,

8:43 whatever it might be, you may find that you need less inhaler,

8:48 you may find that your symptoms are better,

8:50 and you may also find that you don't need inhalers anymore." Is

8:53 that a fair reflection of what you're trying to say in your book?

8:56 I think for most people, asthma is an incurable disease.

9:01 I think for most people,

9:03 type 2 diabetes is an incurable disease because most people

9:07 do not want to do the work to improve their conditions.

9:11 I know this seems very nihilistic, but but that's that's what I believe.

9:14 When you tell someone with type 2 diabetes,

9:17 like, "Hey, you need to cut out the carbs,

9:20 you need to eat more protein and more fat,

9:22 and doing some intermittent fasting could could

9:24 really help you." The science is there.

9:27 It's been there for a very long, especially now, right?

9:29 It's it's irrefutable.

9:31 But, what I found is most people don't want to do that.

9:34 For asthmatics, uh it's the same thing.

9:36 You can tell them that your asthma attacks can

9:40 be directly related to the way in which you breathe,

9:43 especially when you are over breathing,

9:45 that tends to increase your chances of having an attack.

9:49 Will they then sit and do these breath work patterns after that?

9:54 Most won't, right?

9:55 So, what I try to do in this book and the message I'm trying

9:59 to communicate is I want to be

10:01 here to give people information to help themselves,

10:04 but you have to first want to help yourself.

10:07 And if you want to help yourself, there are so many things that you can do

10:11 to improve your health and your chronic condition, especially asthma.

10:16 Retraining yourself to have new breathing habits and to take

10:21 control of an asthma attack through breathing methods, it takes a little time.

10:24 Takes a little effort and it will change your life.

10:28 It's such an interesting topic this, James.

10:30 This idea of what does it take for someone to make changes in their life?

10:37 I mean, I'm I'm obsessed with thinking about this, you know?

10:40 It's It's been a huge part of my job since I qualified in 2001, right?

10:44 How do you encourage, educate, inspire Mhm.

10:51 a patient to make changes?

10:53 And And I think there's there's a couple of components.

10:55 I think you know, I I believe passionately that people want to be well.

11:01 And I believe that the way the message gets communicated to an individual

11:06 is a huge part of whether they're going to do anything.

11:09 If If someone's feels as though they've been spoken down to and dismissed,

11:14 it's unlikely they're going to do much.

11:16 If they feel as though someone has listened to them,

11:19 empathizes with them, is offering them a variety of options,

11:23 I think that increases your likelihood that they're going to choose,

11:27 "Well, actually, you know what?

11:27 If there are a couple of choices, maybe instead of of going on metformin,

11:32 is it okay, doc, if I try this diet and exercise thing for a few months first,

11:37 right?" So, I think that plays a role,

11:39 but but one of the things that came to me,

11:41 James, and I I'd love your take on this.

11:45 You're making the case in your book

11:47 that many of us these days are breathing dysfunctionally.

11:51 We're over breathing, okay?

11:52 So, instead of let's say six breaths a minute,

11:56 many of us are breathing 18 to 20 breaths a minute.

11:59 And you talk in the book about

12:00 the physiological changes that ensue when that happens.

12:04 [clears throat] Now, if we're over breathing and if we're

12:10 breathing more through our mouth than our nose,

12:12 things that we're going to cover in detail shortly,

12:15 you can argue that much of the population

12:19 is in a state of sympathetic overdrive, right?

12:23 So, you know, that that the stress system,

12:25 as you well know, is you can look at in two parts,

12:28 you know, the sympathetic nervous system when we're stressed,

12:31 fight or flight, versus the parasympathetic.

12:34 So, could it be when you say people don't want to do the work

12:38 or in your experience a lot of people don't want to do the work,

12:41 could it also be that because people are

12:44 stuck in these dysfunctional breathing patterns without knowing,

12:48 they're stuck in a stress state, everything feels more difficult,

12:52 when they hear information about how they can change their life,

12:56 it's very hard for them to act on it

12:59 because of the state of their nervous system.

13:01 Do you see what I'm getting at?

13:02 I I absolutely.

13:03 I think what you're saying is 100% correct because we know that the vast

13:07 majority of these modern chronic diseases are tied to chronic stress, right?

13:13 Exactly.

13:12 We We We know this, but I think what it

13:14 ultimately comes down to, it really comes down to that individual.

13:19 When is the time to make that step to improve your life, right?

13:24 What does it take?

13:24 Do you have to be so sick and pushed

13:26 against the wall and given that only chance, you know,

13:30 in order to improve your health or do you

13:33 want to catch it early and do some preventative maintenance?

13:37 Now, everyone's on a different part of that spectrum, right?

13:40 And so, that's what I've found talking to hundreds,

13:42 thousands and thousands of people over the past 5,

13:46 6 years is I found a lot of people want you to coach them and inspire

13:52 them and to push them and yet they still don't manage to take that first step.

13:58 And I've exerted a lot of time and energy with those people,

14:02 including people in my family, right?

14:04 Who still don't want to take that first step.

14:07 And I have had to step back and conserve my own energy and say,

14:11 "All I want to give people is information to make

14:15 educated choices about their health and what you do with it,

14:19 I'm no longer responsible after that." And this is especially important

14:23 for me to give them informed information and choices about breathing,

14:29 about how so many of their chronic issues that they're suffering

14:33 from could be related to the way in which they are breathing.

14:37 And I expected, in a very naive fashion,

14:40 that maybe after this book had sold X amount of copies,

14:43 after I've done so many podcasts,

14:45 I've spoken at medical colleges all over the place,

14:48 that there would be some sort of interest in some

14:51 systemic change to inspire people to start adopting free,

14:56 easy, simple breathing habits.

14:59 None of that has happened.

15:01 I don't see that happening on any level, which is why I think it's best

15:05 and most effective to communicate this message organically

15:09 through podcasts like this to let people empower

15:13 themselves and take control of their own bodies.

15:16 Yeah, I completely agree.

15:17 People are ready for change when they're

15:20 ready for change and not a moment sooner.

15:23 You said a couple of things there, right?

15:24 Which I I think are worth just pausing on.

15:30 Free and easy, I think, were two words you used.

15:35 That's what we're really talking about here

15:36 in a in a in a wellness world that many people

15:39 now will say is expensive and is for the middle

15:43 classes and the people who've got disposable income.

15:45 And of course, there's all kinds of neat little toys and tricks,

15:49 some of them we'll probably talk about today

15:50 that people can spend money on if they want to.

15:53 But as you say in the conclusion of your book,

15:56 the most effective is still the simplest.

15:59 And I'm so passionate about this idea, James,

16:01 because one thing that comes up a lot in this sort

16:04 of field of trying to empower people is that people will say,

16:08 "It's easier for some people than others.

16:10 If you are growing up in poverty, Mhm.

16:13 it's much harder to put these things into practice." Which I agree with.

16:17 Totally.

16:18 And at the same time, I have worked, James, in low socioeconomic areas.

16:25 And I can tell you one thing I would

16:26 teach many of my patients back then was breathwork practices.

16:30 Mhm.

16:31 And it really helped them.

16:32 Does it remove the poverty in their life?

16:34 No, it doesn't.

16:35 But if I can help them get out of stress states

16:40 and have simple things that they can use and keep in their back

16:43 pocket when they need to, I found that they are better able

16:47 to deal with the stresses in their life through using breathwork practices.

16:53 Do you know what I mean?

16:53 So, this this kind of binary point

16:55 of view that it's just for the middle classes.

16:57 It's like, "Well, that's not true because pretty

16:59 much everything you've written about in this book

17:02 is free and available to everyone." I

17:05 think you're right about the wellness industry.

17:07 It's for middle and and upper classes, a lot of it.

17:09 Like some of these devices are thousands and thousands of dollars

17:12 and thousands and thousands of pounds to to just have them.

17:15 And And they work very well, right?

17:18 But you have to start with a foundation.

17:21 So, that's why this book, people are like, "Oh, you know,

17:23 you're the guy that wrote that book about breathwork."

17:25 I don't consider this book to be about breathwork.

17:28 This book is about foundational healthy breathing and why

17:31 so many of us are doing it wrong.

17:33 So, before you go into doing all the fancy stuff,

17:36 I think at on any aspect of wellness,

17:39 before you go and buy the red light sauna, you know,

17:42 that costs $10,000, get out into the sun for 15 minutes a day, right?

17:47 So, introduce yourself slowly to these things in a way

17:51 that is free and easy and accessible for everyone.

17:54 So, the foundations of healthy breathing are by far

17:58 the most important thing that you can do.

18:00 You do not need to go to retreat, you know,

18:04 even though those are nice in in the tropics to learn how to breathe.

18:07 You do not even need to go to a respiratory therapist.

18:10 You need to take control,

18:12 do a few simple steps, establish foundational healthy breathing,

18:17 and then you'll be able to do all of these other things,

18:21 but really get the benefits from them.

18:23 Well, well, let's sort of pick up there.

18:25 You know, let's sort of go through and these are

18:27 things you will have discussed with me in the past,

18:29 but I don't you've been on the show for several years now,

18:31 James, so and I don't think these things can be emphasized enough, right?

18:36 So, what is going on in society?

18:38 What are the common things that people are

18:41 perhaps not doing as well as they could do?

18:43 And then, what are some of these simple,

18:46 easy solutions that people can think about introducing?

18:49 The number one most important thing that people need

18:51 to do is to become an obligate nasal breather.

18:55 So, around 50% of kids are mouth breathers.

18:58 For adults, that goes down a little bit.

19:00 At night, around 60% of adults breathe through their mouths.

19:05 So, you have to turn that around and become a nasal breather in which

19:10 in the daytime most of your breaths are in and out through the nose.

19:13 I'm breathing through my mouth a bit here.

19:15 We're having a conversation.

19:16 Who cares, right?

19:17 When I'm not talking, when I'm walking around, when I'm working,

19:21 I'm always breathing out in in and out through my nose.

19:24 And at night, all of your breaths should be through your nose.

19:27 And there's so much science supporting this, all

19:29 of the benefits from regulating your emotions,

19:32 from helping you make better decisions,

19:36 to regulating your nervous system function.

19:38 More and more, nobody is is debating those things.

19:42 And yet you still have a huge percentage of the population that is

19:45 habitually mouth breathing and is causing a ton of damage to your health.

19:49 Okay, so if this is the number one problem out there.

19:53 Of course, it doesn't mean everyone listening

19:54 suffers from this because as you said, you know, 50% or whatever, right?

19:58 And so clearly there'll be people listening who are obligate nose breathers,

20:03 but there's a lot of people who

20:04 are listening who will be obligate mouth breathers.

20:08 How can they tell or assess if they are an obligate mouth breather?

20:14 So we have unfortunately, there's not one easy step to do because so

20:19 many people suffer from so many different problems, right?

20:22 But there are a few tricks that you can try out.

20:24 The first one, take two fingers from both of your hands.

20:27 If you're listening to this, take your hands,

20:29 take your index finger and your middle finger and place them

20:32 on the sides of your nostrils and spread open your nostrils.

20:37 If that is significantly easier to breathe,

20:42 then there's a good chance you're in the 20% of the population

20:46 that suffers from something called nasal

20:48 valve collapse where either your nostrils,

20:50 the tissue around it is too thin, so when you inhale,

20:54 it flutters [snorts] or your nostrils themselves are too small.

20:57 So if you are one of those people,

20:59 a good training device are one of those nasal strips.

21:02 You see sports players using these things.

21:05 They use them because these strips go over the bridge of the nose and they

21:09 pull the nostrils up to the way they were supposed to have been, right?

21:13 And they allow for around 30% more air flow in and out of the nostrils,

21:18 which is why these are marketed to people

21:20 who snore because so many people who snore

21:23 either have trouble breathing in and out

21:25 of their nose or they're breathing through their mouth.

21:27 If if you are someone who snores, Yes.

21:29 if you know, if you know that about yourself or your partner

21:32 or someone in your family tells you that about yourself,

21:36 can you assume that you're a mouth breather at night?

21:41 It is usually, not always.

21:43 Some people can snore make that sound through

21:46 their nose if their sinuses are are really messed up.

21:49 But most people who are snoring are breathing in and out through the mouth, yes.

21:53 Yeah.

21:53 So that's another simple way of if someone if you know,

21:56 if you have a partner and if they sleep in the same bedroom

21:59 as you and say that you were really loud and snoring last night,

22:03 again, as you say, it's another clue that you might be a a mouth breather.

22:07 Okay.

22:08 Nobody wants to believe their spouse about whether or not you're snoring.

22:12 So the one thing that you can do is download an app.

22:17 There's several of them and I'm not

22:19 affiliated or associated with any of these things.

22:21 They're free and they're easy.

22:22 Snore clock or snore lab works pretty well.

22:25 And what you do is you take your phone,

22:26 put it on the side of your bed and it records

22:28 you throughout the night and then it provides you with a graph

22:31 of the severity of your snoring and the the sound

22:34 of you breathing throughout the night and it gives you a score.

22:38 So if you don't believe the app, you can go back at any time

22:41 and listen to yourself breathing throughout the night.

22:43 If you are snoring or if you're struggling to breathe,

22:47 that is a serious red flag that there is something wrong.

22:50 This is your body at its time when it's supposed to be

22:53 resting and restoring and preparing for the new day, it is stressed out.

22:58 So you have to figure that out and so many people that suffer

23:02 from snoring are mouth breathers and when

23:04 they learn how to become obligate nasal breathers,

23:08 their snoring either significantly reduces or in some cases resolves entirely.

23:13 And I've heard this thousands and thousands of time.

23:16 People send me their sleep data for some reason.

23:18 I never asked for it and they show

23:20 the difference between mouth breathing and nasal breathing.

23:23 I experienced this myself.

23:26 Do we know what it's like in traditional societies,

23:31 you know, how many people are mouth breathers versus nose breathers?

23:35 What we do know is that nasal breathing and breathing itself was

23:39 celebrated as a medicine throughout ancient

23:42 cultures for thousands and thousands of years.

23:44 We know that from ancient Hindu traditions of yoga.

23:48 We know that from ancient Chinese traditions of Qigong.

23:52 We know that from Native American cultures as well.

23:55 You'll notice something with a few indigenous

23:57 cultures that that are still thriving, right?

24:00 That have not industrialized.

24:02 If you were to have them open up their lips and look at their teeth,

24:05 they'd be perfectly straight.

24:07 If you were to look at their airways, they'd be broad and enormous.

24:10 The upper palate would look the opposite of mine.

24:13 It would be almost flat, right?

24:15 How many people in these societies suffers from chronic hypertension,

24:19 diabetes, even skin cancer?

24:22 The answer is basically zero.

24:26 Yeah.

24:24 So almost all of these chronic diseases that we

24:28 are suffering from are what researchers call diseases of civilization.

24:32 These are diseases that came with us living in an industrial world.

24:36 And I'm not going to go live in a cave.

24:38 I'm not going to live in a desert.

24:39 I'm not going to live in a jungle.

24:42 I want to live in this world.

24:43 This is where my friends, my family are.

24:45 This is where my life is.

24:46 But how do you get by living in this world and not get sick?

24:50 And that's the real question and I think

24:53 part of that, not the whole picture at all,

24:55 but part of that is to develop that healthy foundational breathing,

25:01 especially at night.

25:03 It's so important at night to get this right and there is an epidemic,

25:08 especially among kids, of sleep disordered breathing,

25:12 of snoring and sleep apnea.

25:15 You mentioned some of the things we can try and use as clues Mhm.

25:20 to figure out where do we do the majority of our breathing.

25:23 Is it through my nose or is it through my mouth?

25:26 Would you say another way in which we can look

25:28 at that ourselves is to go for 20-30 minute walk,

25:32 let's say around your block, right?

25:34 And see if you can do it with your mouth closed

25:39 or do you need to open it in order to get around?

25:42 Is it Is that something you'd recommend people take a look at?

25:45 I would start off with getting baseline data.

25:50 Use one of those apps,

25:51 whatever app you want to use and record your breathing at night.

25:55 And if you are breathing in a dysfunctional way at night,

25:58 there's a good chance you're breathing dysfunctionally in the day.

26:02 So once you do that, record it not for one night cuz your sleep changes, right?

26:06 Every night.

26:06 Record it for a week and and get a baseline.

26:09 After that, that's where you can start experimenting with these different hacks.

26:13 One of them is to use a little piece of tape

26:15 in the daytime while answering emails or doing dishes or watching TV,

26:20 put it on your lips and let it stay there for 20 minutes, right?

26:25 And ask yourself as you're breathing, right?

26:27 This forces you to breathe in and out through through your nose,

26:30 are you comfortable?

26:32 Are you relaxed?

26:33 Are you congested?

26:35 If you If you are congested and if you're stressed out,

26:38 use common sense, take it off.

26:40 You're not ready for this yet.

26:41 But start very slow.

26:44 This is something I got wrong in this book before

26:46 where I told people to experiment with it at night.

26:50 No.

26:51 Start with it.

26:51 That's what I did and and it took me a long time and I had to stick with it.

26:55 Took weeks for me to to acclimate to it.

26:58 Start slow.

26:59 Start in the daytime.

27:00 20 minutes the first day, 30 minutes the next day, 1 hour the day after that.

27:05 Try taking a nap with this little piece of tape.

27:08 And then once you're good at that, if that is comfortable for you,

27:12 walk around the block focusing on keeping your mouth shut.

27:17 Yeah.

27:17 Inhaling in and out of your nose.

27:19 And if that continues to be comfortable,

27:22 then you can experiment with it at night.

27:26 But I think low and slow, especially if you are a habitual mouth breather,

27:31 this is going to be a shock to your system.

27:33 So don't push it.

27:34 Yeah.

27:34 You went in hard at yourself.

27:38 And I've told you this before, but after our first conversation together,

27:41 James, when you mentioned mouth taping, careful how I say this.

27:46 Um you mentioned family before.

27:49 I think I mentioned this to my wife prior.

27:52 Um but I'm not sure she necessarily wants to hear this stuff from me, right?

27:56 So when she heard you say it on our podcast together,

28:00 I think straight away she started taping her mouth at night.

28:04 And it was literally like night and day.

28:07 I'm not kidding you, but her energy and vibrancy the next day,

28:11 it was I was like, what's going on?

28:13 She's like, I think this mouth taping stuff is working, right?

28:16 So I think, you know, yes,

28:18 that the kind of I guess more responsible advice you could say is to say,

28:21 "Hey, go slow, build up." But some people will just go straight in.

28:26 Some people will be thinking, James,

28:27 what is it dangerous for me to tape my mouth up at night?

28:33 Mhm.

28:33 You know, what what I mean,

28:34 you must have been asked this a million times, I'm guessing.

28:36 I've been asked this a million times.

28:38 Um and it depends, okay?

28:41 There is sorry, um you know, it was very inconvenient.

28:44 There's not a blanket prescription for everybody to do this stuff.

28:47 Everybody is different.

28:48 Their tolerance levels are different.

28:50 The um amount of dysfunctional breathing that they are

28:53 on that spectrum is totally different depending on the person,

28:57 which is why if you go slowly and carefully and go slow,

29:01 your body will tell you when you're pushing too hard.

29:04 It will let you know when when you've gone over that line.

29:08 For people with severe sleep apnea, this is probably a really bad idea, right?

29:14 I would not do it.

29:16 At the same time, can't believe I'm saying this, but a lot

29:19 of people with severe sleep apnea have written me and sent me

29:23 their AHI scores before and after mouth taping and have seen

29:27 a 50% decrease in the amount of apnea events they have per hour.

29:34 So I'm not here to tell anyone to do anything.

29:37 As we said at the beginning of the podcast, I'm giving you information.

29:41 You can take this information and you can be responsible

29:44 for your own health and do what you want with it.

29:46 This is a free and easy thing to do.

29:49 For the majority of people with mild snoring and even mild sleep apnea,

29:55 um certain forms of mild sleep apnea,

29:57 once they experiment with this, just just like your wife, right?

30:02 It is a completely life-transforming thing.

30:06 A teeny piece of tape um can do that much for your energy levels,

30:12 which to me makes perfect sense.

30:14 Because if you are not sleeping properly, if you're not entering those stages

30:18 of deep restorative sleep every single night, it's going to catch up with you.

30:22 Once you get that back, like, what do I do with all this energy?

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32:08 There's a couple of things that come to mind, right?

32:09 First of all, why is it that focusing on the way that you

32:15 breathe can have such incredible benefits on a variety of different conditions,

32:21 you know, asthma, energy, high blood pressure, you know,

32:24 you write in the book about autoimmune disease

32:26 and how certain things where it can help.

32:28 And then, of course, if you think about it logically,

32:31 and look at root causes of physiology in the body,

32:36 you're led back to the stress response.

32:38 led back That's That's exactly it.

32:40 is intimately linked with your stress response.

32:44 You know, with patients I would always say breathing is information, right?

32:48 When you're stressed, you change the way you breathe,

32:51 and that sends signals up to your brain,

32:54 and it almost becomes a vicious cycle where your brain then feels under threat.

32:57 The opposite is true.

32:58 When you're calm and your your breath is

33:00 slower and it's deeper and let's say it's quieter,

33:03 we can talk about these things shortly,

33:05 you're then sending calm signals up to your brain.

33:07 So, it makes complete sense to me that working

33:13 on your breathing can help a variety of different conditions.

33:18 The other thing I was thinking about this morning, James,

33:19 is this idea that if so many of us in society have dysfunctional breathing,

33:26 as you said at the start, you know, we're able to live, okay?

33:29 So, we're surviving.

33:31 We may not be thriving, but we're absolutely surviving.

33:35 We're basically going about our daily lives at like 30 or 40%.

33:41 Mhm.

33:41 So, what happens is we have evolved to register threats in a certain way.

33:49 Your heart rate goes up, your respiration goes up.

33:52 And this is extremely useful.

33:54 If you're out in the wild and you see

33:57 a intruder coming into your camp, or you see a lion,

34:01 or you see a bear, whatever, this ramps you up to fight or to run away, right?

34:07 And so, we we've developed this for a reason.

34:10 Now, everything stresses us out.

34:12 An email from your boss is going to stress you out.

34:15 Traffic is going to stress you out.

34:16 So, what's happening is we stay in this stress response,

34:21 that breathing quickens, and we tend to keep that breathing throughout the day.

34:26 So, as you mentioned, not only is the brain controlling our breathing,

34:31 but our breathing is controlling the brain.

34:33 It goes the other way.

34:35 So, if you are overbreathing and you are breathing

34:38 into your chest and your mouth is a little open, [panting]

34:42 and you go to any airport, sit on any subway, and you see this all the time.

34:47 You are sending your brain constant signals that you are stressed out,

34:51 and you can't break that cycle unless you first take control of your breathing.

34:56 I don't know of any meditation,

34:59 any technique that can lower the nervous system overload, right?

35:04 That can switch you to parasympathetic that does not involve breathing.

35:09 Slowing down your breathing, taking deeper breaths,

35:12 breathing in and out of your nose.

35:15 All of these are foundational to all of those practices.

35:21 And the effects are so far-reaching, right?

35:23 So, if you are breathing in a dysfunctional way for the majority of your day,

35:30 that could be at least one of the reasons

35:34 why you're reactive with your partner that evening,

35:37 why you snap at your children,

35:39 why you feel a need for sugar or alcohol at the end of the day.

35:43 Because a lot of the time those things they're downstream,

35:47 if you're stressed if you're stressed if your nervous system is amped up,

35:52 those things are manifestations of that.

35:55 So, why I believe that we all need our own

35:59 personal breath work practice that we can have in our back

36:01 pocket that we can take around with us should we start

36:04 feeling anxious or nervous or stressed is A because it's free,

36:09 B because it's effective, and C because the effects are so wide-ranging.

36:14 And once you check that box, then you can work on all the other stuff, right?

36:19 And and so, it's not going to fix everything.

36:21 I would never ever say that, but it is

36:23 your first step towards getting control of your asthma attack,

36:28 of your panic attack, of your emotions, of making a better decision, right?

36:34 This is the first step, and it takes a few seconds to do.

36:44 That's how long it takes to start to turn

36:47 down the volume in your brain and your body.

36:51 And then, if you do a few dozen of those breaths,

36:54 if you're extremely stressed out, you'll start to turn it down a little more.

37:00 And for people who don't believe

37:02 this, that think this is some hippie yoga thing,

37:05 again, hook yourself up to instruments that are

37:10 feeding you a constant stream of data.

37:12 Look what happens to your brain.

37:14 Look what happens to your blood pressure, your heart rate,

37:16 and more when you take just a few calm and slow breaths.

37:21 Yeah.

37:22 A lot of people have heard the term white coat hypertension, you know,

37:26 the the high blood pressure you get when you go into your doctor's office.

37:30 But what you said just there in so many

37:33 ways explains the physiology of what happens there, right?

37:36 So, you're nervous, you've just rushed through

37:38 traffic to get to your doctor's appointment, you couldn't get a parking space,

37:42 you just you you squeezed one in, you you

37:44 maybe you put it on a double yellow line,

37:46 you ran in, and then the doctor's taking your blood pressure.

37:49 Well, you're stressed out, your nervous system's up,

37:53 and we know that one of the you know,

37:56 one of the things that will happen when you're stressed out,

37:58 when you see that lion, is your blood pressure will go we want it to go

38:01 up because we want more oxygen going up to your brain.

38:04 Chronically elevated high blood pressure is such a big problem these days.

38:08 And of course, you know, usually at your doctor,

38:11 you'll be offered pharmaceutical medication, which can have value,

38:14 of course, but it may also be that you

38:17 don't need it if you start working on your breathing.

38:22 You know, if you're a mouth breather compared to a nose breather,

38:25 it may be that that's one of the big

38:27 contributory factors to your blood pressure being up,

38:30 and you wouldn't know that until you do the work

38:34 at trying to change it over to being a nose breather.

38:38 And as you mentioned, these drugs are great.

38:40 These drugs have saved so many millions

38:42 [clears throat] and millions of people's lives, right?

38:44 And they're a great first step of getting a severe chronic condition in control.

38:49 But you have to ask yourself,

38:51 do you want to be on these drugs the rest of your life?

38:53 If you do, that's fine.

38:54 Then then good for you.

38:55 And if you don't, if you want to try

38:57 to take control of it through more natural means,

39:00 then breathing is one of the options that is available for you.

39:05 I would like to throw out a little

39:07 challenge for somebody who has high blood pressure.

39:09 If you have a high blood pressure if you have a cough,

39:12 you can take your blood pressure before, right?

39:16 And then you can spend maybe three or four minutes breathing at a rate

39:21 of around five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out.

39:25 And on that exhale, you can hum.

39:27 You can breathe in through the nose, expanding the belly here.

39:33 And on the exhale, doesn't have to be very loud.

39:38 Just That's going to release this profusion

39:41 of nitric oxide into your bloodstream,

39:45 which helps dilate those blood vessels, right?

39:48 And it helps bring your blood pressure down.

39:51 I've seen people do this and drop

39:53 their scores by 20 points within a few minutes.

39:57 Now, it's temporary unless you adopt better breathing habits,

40:01 and there are some studies that show this can

40:03 be very effective for for the long term.

40:06 There are no guarantees for anybody with any of this stuff.

40:10 Hypertension can be multifactorial.

40:12 Like there are there are so many issues.

40:14 If your blood vessels, you know, aren't able to to expand and constrict, right?

40:18 If if there's calcium coating there there's so many different things.

40:22 But as as a first step to convince yourself this isn't hippie nonsense,

40:27 um I I offer that challenge to people who want to take it up.

40:32 Just a few minutes.

40:33 And if you see a decrease in your blood pressure,

40:36 if you feel better after a few minutes,

40:39 what's going to happen after a few days and a few weeks and a few months?

40:45 Then you can start improving your diet.

40:47 Then you can start improving your exercise regimen,

40:50 and you can start taking control of your health.

40:53 And that's what inspires me is to hear from people who

40:56 have done this and are able to live more normal, thriving lives.

41:03 Yeah.

41:04 One of the big things we're talking about here is trying

41:07 to get people to breathe through their nose more than their mouth, okay?

41:12 Some people will no doubt say, "Yeah, James,

41:16 I get that, but I've got a blocked nose." Mhm.

41:19 Right?

41:20 So, or I can't do it.

41:23 Can you just tackle this?

41:25 Because I think this is a common thing that comes up,

41:26 and I think some of those things are quite amenable to change.

41:30 Some may be not so much, but um you know,

41:33 what what's your best advice for people on that?

41:35 I again, I would love to offer you

41:37 a very simple answer to this to this question, but there are no simple answers.

41:42 Some people have structural issues in their sinuses, right?

41:47 Their turbinates are too plugged up.

41:49 They have a severely deviated septum.

41:51 I've broken my nose two, three times, right?

41:53 Never got it fixed.

41:55 When I had a scan done of my head,

41:57 um they showed that I was extremely messed up, right?

42:00 So, some people have structural issues,

42:02 and an ENT can can really help you, right?

42:06 For most people, though, and I've heard this from ENTs.

42:09 I've heard this from rhinologists and respiratory therapists.

42:12 For most people, it is the tissues, and it is inflammation.

42:16 And a lot of this congestion is tied

42:19 from the fact that these people are habitual mouth breathers,

42:23 so their nose literally starts closing up.

42:26 This is a use it or lose it organ.

42:28 The more you use it, the more it is going to naturally open up.

42:32 I was one of those people.

42:33 Even though I have massive structural issues in my nose,

42:36 I got through that, and I'm able to breathe completely normally through my nose.

42:40 And the respiratory therapist at Stanford that I

42:42 talked to about this had the exact same thing.

42:45 She was slated for surgery.

42:47 She started nasal breathing, started humming,

42:49 started using a little piece of tape, and everything changed,

42:53 which is why she prescribes tape to every single one of her patients.

42:57 So, again, we have that spectrum Yeah.

43:00 of nasal breathing.

43:01 For people with extreme structural issues, go get a scan, get checked out.

43:05 Surgery can be incredibly beneficial.

43:08 For most of us that are just dealing with bad habits and chronic congestion,

43:13 there are a lot of things you can do

43:15 to improve that congestion so that nasal breathing becomes easier.

43:20 It's linked to everything.

43:21 This idea that our lifestyles can be

43:23 our best medicine is something I'm so passionate about.

43:26 It's that's not anti-medicine.

43:28 It's just saying we can also use food as medicine, Mhm.

43:32 exercise as medicine, or as you've just mentioned,

43:35 breathing as medicine if we do it in the correct way, right?

43:42 And this idea that some of us are congested,

43:45 and therefore we think we can't breathe through our noses.

43:48 You've just addressed that, and of course

43:50 the chronic mouth breathing could be causing that congestion.

43:53 So, if you can change it over, before you know it, that will start to change.

43:57 But it could also be because if

43:58 your diet if you're having loads of ultra-processed foods,

44:01 some of them you're perhaps reacting to, maybe not a full-blown allergy,

44:05 maybe a little bit of an intolerance, that can also cause congestion.

44:09 Intolerances are I know I can be very sensitive to foods.

44:12 And if I eat the wrong foods for me, I I start to feel my nose blocking up.

44:18 Dairy is one of those.

44:19 Just going to say that, I guess.

44:20 That's right.

44:21 kind of Asians and African sort of descent people, dairy is an issue, you know?

44:27 So, all these things are multifactorial.

44:29 I'm not saying that to confuse people.

44:32 I'm kind of saying that to empower people to go,

44:34 "I think most people will be able to breathe through their nose." But of course,

44:39 some people will need to go and see an ENT doctor,

44:41 and they may need some work if they've had a broken nose, for example.

44:44 The most work you're going to have to do is figure

44:47 out what is your core issue stopping you from nasal breathing, right?

44:51 That's where the most work and most research.

44:53 After that, applying these different hacks,

44:56 this is the easy and the fun part, right?

44:59 So, is it structural?

45:01 Is it just chronic inflammation?

45:03 Is it just a bad habit?

45:05 If it is chronic inflammation, what's causing that?

45:08 Try an elimination diet, right?

45:10 Remove remove dairy for a week.

45:13 Um we know that snoring and sleep apnea go through the roof in allergy season.

45:18 Why?

45:19 Because people get stuffed up,

45:21 they start [snorts] mouth breathing, and they start snoring.

45:24 So, if we know that's what's causing such a huge

45:27 percentage of snoring and even mild to moderate sleep apnea,

45:30 then it makes sense to me find a way of clearing your nose.

45:33 There's some antihistamine drugs that work really well for people who want

45:38 to clear their nose and be able to get a nice night of sleep.

45:42 Do you think for some people they're they've got functional breathing patterns.

45:45 They're breathing through their nose at night,

45:47 but then let's say it's allergy season, right?

45:50 Mhm.

45:50 And so for a month they're struggling with hay fever.

45:53 They've got a blocked nose.

45:54 So, you know, because they're not paying attention,

45:57 they start to mouth breathe more.

45:59 Yes.

46:00 But could it be that before they know it,

46:03 they're starting to ingrain a new pattern?

46:07 Yes.

46:07 So, allergy season finishes,

46:10 but actually the pattern that they developed then continues long-term.

46:14 This is why so many kids get asthma.

46:16 Not all of them, but so many kids

46:18 they start with a severe respiratory um problem, right?

46:22 The flu or something.

46:23 They develop mouth breathing over a few weeks,

46:26 and at night it becomes very, very easy.

46:29 [sighs] [panting] Through those bad habits,

46:32 they start getting symptoms of asthma that becomes asthma,

46:34 inflammation of the airways, right?

46:36 If you have inflammation of the airways, that's the core issue.

46:39 What do you do?

46:40 You need to remove that inflammation.

46:43 And the drugs are great.

46:44 Bronchodilators work wonderfully.

46:46 Oral steroids can work great.

46:48 But as a long-term solution, we know now very clearly those are bad news.

46:53 After a few decades of taking oral steroids,

46:55 it can lead to a bunch of chronic issues.

46:58 So, it might be a good opportunity when you see that red

47:02 flag appear with your kid or with yourself to be like,

47:06 "Okay, I don't need to do it tomorrow.

47:08 I don't need to do it this week,

47:09 but soon I should consider getting better control of this so that I

47:14 can live a fuller life without relying on increasing doses of these drugs." So,

47:21 going back to where we started, we were talking about asthma,

47:25 and you've just brought up asthma again.

47:28 We made the case, and and look,

47:30 you you've made it at length before when you've been on the show,

47:33 um about nasal breathing versus mouth breathing,

47:35 and people can revisit our earlier episodes if they want to go deeper into that.

47:41 If someone's listening to this, and they currently have asthma, Mhm.

47:47 [clears throat] and you always acknowledge you're not a doctor, right?

47:49 You're not a physician.

47:51 You're a journalist who has done the research and is sharing it.

47:54 So, I'll you'll make it clear.

47:55 I'm making that clear.

47:57 But what is something that that person can

47:59 think about doing to start to improve things?

48:04 The number one thing I would do is to get

48:07 a very good respiratory therapist who has experience with asthmatics.

48:12 If you can afford that, if that's available for you,

48:15 these people can coach you through the entire thing.

48:19 They are qualified to do this.

48:21 If you are someone who does not want to take that path,

48:24 who wants to experiment with things on your own, I am not a doctor.

48:29 You need to be talking to your doctor about this.

48:31 Do not stop taking any of your drugs, to to be clear.

48:35 But you can start experimenting with healthy,

48:39 slower, more nourishing breathing habits.

48:42 There are no negative side effects to breathing better.

48:46 Zero.

48:47 And part of what you can do,

48:48 we've we've talked about the nasal breathing versus mouth breathing, right?

48:52 If that's not available to you,

48:54 or you've already established that, the next thing you

48:56 can do is to learn to take softer, deeper breaths.

49:02 Fewer breaths that are more enriching.

49:06 And this is how this looks.

49:07 This does not make for good podcast, cuz it's going to be silent,

49:10 but you're just taking an inhale through your nose.

49:15 Very softly, you're feeling a soft expansion in the abdominal area.

49:20 And as you exhale, you feel a slight contraction.

49:24 I shouldn't be able to see your shoulders going up and down.

49:27 You are not forcing this.

49:29 If I were watching you breathe from across a sofa, right?

49:33 With a coffee table in front, I would not be able to see you breathe.

49:37 It is so soft and so subtle.

49:40 I I think James, it reminds me,

49:41 did you not write in the book at some point about many years ago in Japan,

49:48 a test to join the army, I think Was That's right.

49:51 You have to breathe with a feather under your nose and the you know,

49:55 if if people could see the feather move, you don't get in.

49:59 Yep.

50:00 Right?

50:00 Good good memory.

50:02 [laughter] Yeah.

50:02 Yeah.

50:02 That's

50:02 mean you wrote this book many years ago now, but you do you remember that story?

50:05 I certainly do remember that and it sticks

50:07 with me cuz it's such a a visual image, right?

50:11 Um because that is showing how in control of you

50:15 uh uh how in control of your body are you, right?

50:19 Are you able to control your nervous system

50:21 because if you can't control your nervous system

50:23 in your breathing in a environment in which you were safe in front of you know,

50:29 other officers, who could think that you could control yourself

50:34 when you really need to have your act together in battle?

50:38 And this is something that could be very effective for asthmatics.

50:42 If you were able to breathe so soft and so subtly,

50:47 you think about the amount of inflammation in your airways,

50:51 you think about what happens during an asthma attack.

50:54 Asthmatics breathe in, [sighs and gasps] they feel some constriction, right?

50:59 And that makes them paranoid.

51:01 They have to get another breath in, right?

51:04 Oh, I'm going to lose my breath.

51:05 I need to breathe some more.

51:08 [sighs and panting]

51:09 Panic attack, asthma attack, they're so similar in so many ways.

51:13 But if you start to feel that coming

51:16 on, instead of defaulting to over breathing,

51:19 which is the single worst thing you can do at that moment,

51:23 why not default to an even slower, even softer breath?

51:29 And Patrick McKeown, whom you've had on this this show,

51:32 this is what he has done with thousands and thousands

51:36 of asthmatics around the world to reduce or resolve their asthma.

51:41 It is a real thing and it's not too much of a of a leap of logic

51:47 to be like if if over breathing is

51:49 causing inflammation and causing my airway to close up,

51:54 well, obviously, if I breathe more slowly and softly,

51:57 that's going to open things up.

51:59 And I guess the other point that to raise

52:01 there is that as you mentioned about Patrick McKeown,

52:03 he's done this with thousands of asthmatics,

52:07 asthma is also multifactorial, right?

52:11 Why not, if you're interested, give this a try?

52:14 You may find things get fully better.

52:17 You may find that you need less inhalers.

52:19 You may be able to get off your steroid inhaler and only

52:21 use the blue salbutamol inhaler now and again when you get wheezy.

52:26 You know, or it may make no difference, right?

52:29 Which is unlikely it's going to make no difference, but there's no risk here.

52:34 You know, there are effects of slow conscious breathing, right?

52:41 But I wouldn't necessarily call them side effects.

52:43 They're sort of very desirable effects, aren't they?

52:47 I've never heard of any negative side effect to doing something better,

52:51 to allowing your body to restore better

52:53 and and breathing is certainly part of that.

52:55 I don't know of any negative side effect to learning how to eat better, right?

52:59 Or or learning how to exercise at a normal level.

53:02 There are no negative side effects of this.

53:04 I think the difference with breathing is

53:06 it's avail- available to us all the time.

53:09 Mhm.

53:09 So, uh you know, unlike exercise, people say, "Oh,

53:12 you should meditate for 30 minutes twice a day." That will work.

53:16 A lot of people can't fit that into their schedules,

53:18 but this is something that you can be

53:20 doing as you go about into your world, right?

53:24 As you sit in your office, as you sit in a car,

53:27 as you walk around, you can be improving your breathing.

53:30 And the point of all of this is to develop better

53:34 habits so that you don't need to think about it months later.

53:39 And that's really where I like to get people cuz they say,

53:42 "Oh, my I got to pay attention to my mouth.

53:45 I got to pay attention to breathing really low and slow.

53:48 I have to pay attention to my diaphragm." I said, "You do for now, Yeah.

53:52 but soon you won't even have to think about it.

53:55 This is your new default and it can change your life."

54:00 For people who want to start introducing that practice and they go,

54:04 "Okay, I want I want to look at nasal breathing.

54:06 I want to do that slow silent breath,

54:09 which you know, the the timing if people want to know,

54:12 it's all in the book about you know,

54:15 5 and 1/2 or 6 seconds in, 5 and 1/2 or 6 seconds out.

54:22 [gasps]

54:21 What is the minimum amount of time you think someone really needs to invest

54:26 in doing that kind of breath to start feeling and getting a difference?

54:31 Some people can change a habit in a few weeks, right?

54:33 Some people can change a habit in several months.

54:37 I was able to change my habits permanently in a couple of months.

54:41 A pretty regular but I get kind of into this stuff, you know?

54:45 So, a pretty rigorous exercises of really sticking to the plan because

54:52 I felt every day what this was doing for my conscious waking hours,

54:56 my energy levels, my ability to think more clearly, and especially at night,

55:02 the depth of my sleep, how I was able to sleep so much better.

55:06 So, it inspired me to keep going.

55:08 But it depends on again, where you are on that spectrum.

55:11 You can start with these very, very simple things.

55:14 Experiment with nasal breathing.

55:17 Experiment with the tape.

55:19 And next time you're walking around, doesn't matter if you're walking to work,

55:23 walking in an airport,

55:24 breathe in and out of your nose and be sure you're doing that.

55:29 Breathing in and out of your nose.

55:31 If it's comfortable for you at one pace,

55:33 speed it up and see where that limit is, right?

55:37 And then just stay just behind that limit to acclimate yourself to it.

55:43 Yeah.

55:42 Once you really start tuning in and become aware,

55:45 you start to notice it everywhere.

55:47 You know, you start to notice when you're not doing it.

55:50 And you know, I've I've realized in my own life that, you know,

55:54 what one part of my job is to have host these conversations.

55:57 So, of course, for most of it, well, for a lot of it,

56:00 you mouth breathing because that's what you do when you talk.

56:03 And I think each your friend of ours, Brian MacKenzie,

56:06 I I've chance to learn a lot about this over the years and I've actually noticed

56:10 that when I'm doing live events and speaking

56:13 or I'm doing a lot of podcasting, actually,

56:17 I do notice there's a little bit of fatigue compared to doing other

56:22 tasks that don't require me to open my mouth cuz it's a you know,

56:26 there's a different physiology going on when you're

56:29 breathing mostly through your mouth than through your nose.

56:32 And if people [laughter] want to really see the difference,

56:34 they should read the book and look

56:36 at that 20-day Stanford experiment, which is alarming.

56:38 Could you just give us the top line of that?

56:41 I know it's it's there's a lot

56:42 of color and storytelling around it throughout the book,

56:46 but just talk top line what happened to really

56:49 show people the differences between mouth breathing and nasal breathing.

56:52 I do want to mention one thing and I'm I'm

56:54 happy to do that, give you the bullet points from that.

56:57 But regarding public speaking and mouth breathing, so I'm in the same boat.

57:02 So, we're in the same line of work, right?

57:04 We have to do this day long and I was talking to a a breath

57:08 worker about this and I I said, "You know,

57:10 I really want to figure out a way of conserving my energy

57:13 cuz I'm just gassed at the end of these long conversations, you know?

57:17 I'm so excited to do them, but I think it's not just mentally.

57:21 I think it's physical." And she told me,

57:24 she said, "Well, in between every sentence that you say,

57:28 you just stop and you take a nasal

57:31 breath in and then you exhale." I'm like, "Cool.

57:34 That's not going to work on a stage

57:36 with a thousand people [laughter] doing a podcast." So,

57:39 the the answer to that in in my mind is we live in this world, right?

57:45 We're going to have to abuse our bodies.

57:47 I didn't sleep very well last night.

57:48 I was in a hotel, it was very loud, right?

57:50 I'm on a lot of airplanes.

57:52 I don't always eat that well when I'm on the road.

57:54 When I'm home, I try to take better.

57:56 But I choose to live in this world.

57:58 There are some things you're just going to have to deal with.

58:01 And one of those things is this level

58:03 of exhaustion after talking for 7, 8 hours a day.

58:08 Not mental fatigue.

58:10 It's But I'm not moving.

58:12 I'm just sitting down.

58:13 I'm like, "Why am I so tired?" I talked to a a Qigong master about this and he

58:18 said that this is why in ancient China

58:22 and and currently people that adhere to Qigong practices, no emotions.

58:27 They're very straight up because emotions take energy from you, too.

58:31 Always breathing in and out of the nose.

58:33 Speaking seldomly.

58:35 I said, "Totally cool if you're living a solitary life in the woods."

58:41 That does not work for for my line of work, right?

58:45 So, I think we're just kind of hosed as far as that goes.

58:48 The one thing we can do is when we're done talking,

58:50 when we're done with this podcast,

58:52 in the taxi back to the airport, I'm going to be humming.

58:55 I'm going to be breathing in and out of my nose and I'm going to try

58:59 to get my respiration locked back in so

59:01 I can conserve the energy that I have left.

59:03 Yeah, but what the practical take home is for people

59:06 is just be aware that if you are in a job,

59:10 let's say you're in sales and you're constantly

59:13 on the phone or in meetings and trying

59:15 to talk to people or constantly on Zoom calls as part of your job and talking,

59:19 just be aware that that does take a certain toll and you might notice

59:23 on days where you're not on those Zoom calls or you're not talking as much,

59:28 you may go, "Oh, wow, I'm not quite as tired or I my you know,

59:32 my propensity to want to do things in the evening is different.

59:35 So, a lot of people now,

59:36 of course, if they're driving with Bluetooth technology,

59:39 they will catch up with mates or family members while driving.

59:43 You know, again, there's a road safety issue,

59:46 which I must acknowledge, you know,

59:47 and the the the the the we're sort of talking about it

59:50 through the lens of that I'm I'm not saying don't do it,

59:55 you know, if if it's safe to do so when you want to do it,

59:57 but just be aware constantly talking is

1:00:01 likely to take some of your energy, right?

1:00:05 And one of the reasons for that is

1:00:07 to do with mouth breathing versus nasal breathing.

1:00:09 So, I think it's the again,

1:00:11 going back to what you said at the start, it's about empowering people.

1:00:14 It's about just helping someone's going to be

1:00:15 listening to that going, "Oh my god, that's why on Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm

1:00:21 knackered after work because I'm talking all

1:00:23 day." And it's just these little penny

1:00:24 dropping moments that help people become more self-aware.

1:00:28 And we're not saying don't talk.

1:00:30 Exactly.

1:00:31 I'm [laughter] not we're not saying put a put a chalkboard around

1:00:33 your neck and and write stuff out and say because because I'm too fatigued.

1:00:37 It's acknowledging it.

1:00:38 Your your body's flexible.

1:00:39 It's meant to be stressed at times.

1:00:41 But I've noticed the thing that restores me

1:00:44 the most is silence and darkness after events.

1:00:48 And if I have that, I get a reboot,

1:00:50 and so the next day I can do it all over again.

1:00:52 So, it's just just something to recognize.

1:00:54 And this does tie into the Stanford experiment,

1:00:57 in which I had read so many studies, talked to so many experts in about

1:01:02 the difference of mouth breathing and nasal breathing,

1:01:04 all the benefits of nasal breathing.

1:01:06 It helps filter allergens, viruses, bacteria, nitric oxide,

1:01:12 uh calms the nervous system, allows more oxygen to pump to the brain.

1:01:16 We know all of this.

1:01:17 And we also knew a lot about the damage of mouth breathing,

1:01:21 how it makes you more apt to have respiratory infections, snoring, and more.

1:01:25 So, that was established.

1:01:27 But no one had done a study mm.

1:01:29 really a side-to-side of having a control of like,

1:01:34 "What does mouth breathing in the same person

1:01:36 look like?" And then switching them to nasal breathing.

1:01:40 What does that look like?

1:01:41 It was 10 days of forced mouth breathing.

1:01:45 Sounds awful.

1:01:46 Followed.

1:01:46 Yeah.

1:01:46 But you tell people That's what people thought like,

1:01:49 "Oh, this is some Super Size Me, you know, stunt or whatever." But if you look

1:01:53 at the amount of people that are chronically congested,

1:01:58 this is not some crazy thing.

1:02:00 This is we're just putting ourselves into the position of what

1:02:03 milli- tens of millions of people feel like every single day.

1:02:07 The difference is we're recording data.

1:02:10 Okay, so 10 days of mouth breathing, 10 days of nasal breathing.

1:02:13 What was the difference?

1:02:14 The biggest difference was in sleep.

1:02:16 This is why I keep going back to sleep.

1:02:18 I can talk about the things that we felt.

1:02:21 Those aren't as important.

1:02:22 Extreme fatigue, right?

1:02:25 Um very uh cloudy in in our thoughts,

1:02:28 uh constantly struggling to stay awake, all all of these things, sleepiness.

1:02:34 But the things that were really measured more than anything else was sleep.

1:02:39 I don't snore.

1:02:40 I don't have sleep apnea.

1:02:41 In a single night of converting to mouth-only breathing,

1:02:47 my snoring went up about an hour and a half from zero.

1:02:50 And 3 days later, it was at around 4 to 5 hours a night,

1:02:55 and it stayed there and got worse every

1:02:58 single day that that phase of the study continued.

1:03:01 The other person in the study,

1:03:02 we were allowed a maximum of two people, only two.

1:03:06 I know it would have been great to have 200,

1:03:08 but I've been trying to get that study going for a long time.

1:03:10 They say, "Cool.

1:03:11 Do you have $10 million?" I I don't.

1:03:13 So, we had two people in this.

1:03:15 The exact same thing happened with them.

1:03:18 Anders Olsen, he volunteered to be in the study.

1:03:21 Zero snoring, zero sleep apnea when he was breathing normally as as he would.

1:03:27 And then it full-on full snoring throughout the night and sleep apnea,

1:03:31 choking on ourselves simply by changing

1:03:34 the pathway through which we breathe air.

1:03:36 And then for the other phase,

1:03:38 where we converted to nasal breathing, wore a little piece of tape,

1:03:41 all of the snoring, all of the sleep apnea,

1:03:44 all of it 100% resolved after day two.

1:03:48 And I have heard this from so many people, as I mentioned,

1:03:52 you you talk about your wife, uh who send me their stuff and say,

1:03:56 "Why don't more people know about it?" Now there's all these products,

1:03:59 mouth tape products, and all that because it's irrefutable.

1:04:02 People have have seen the data, and they've also had the experience.

1:04:07 I think, you know, there were all these products,

1:04:09 and you can buy them, and some of them make it easier.

1:04:11 They've got various things where if your mouth wants to open, it can.

1:04:15 But you know, I've got this sort of tape just kicking around the house.

1:04:19 It I don't you know, you're literally talking, aren't you?

1:04:22 Just about a tiny bit on your lips.

1:04:26 You know, it's not expensive.

1:04:28 You know, it's so cheap.

1:04:30 And as you just said, it could literally try I mean,

1:04:34 I don't think we're overselling it to say if you're a mouth

1:04:36 breather and you train yourself to breathe through your nose at night,

1:04:40 it could transform your experience of day-to-day life.

1:04:43 Depends who you are, but that's that's certainly what so many people have been

1:04:48 telling me at an event I just did in London.

1:04:51 Once again, there were three different people

1:04:53 in the crowd that grabbed the microphone and said,

1:04:56 "You saved my marriage." You know, you keep hearing this over and over and over,

1:05:00 and there's there's something to it.

1:05:04 The so many different topics in Breath when I was

1:05:09 rereading it that I thought would be fun to talk about.

1:05:14 One of my favorite chapters was Exhale.

1:05:18 And I started to do an exercise yesterday that I've never done before, right?

1:05:22 So, in that chapter, you talk about this idea that shallow

1:05:25 breathing will limit the range of our diaphragms.

1:05:29 You know, it's like use it or lose it phenomenon you mentioned before, right?

1:05:32 If we're not using our diaphragm to its full ability,

1:05:35 we're going to limit its range.

1:05:38 And in that chapter on Exhale, you mentioned um was it this Coraster?

1:05:42 What was his name, the Coraster?

1:05:44 Carl Stough.

1:05:45 Yeah, Carl Stough.

1:05:47 And there was this exercise you talked about,

1:05:49 which I did with my kids last time,

1:05:51 which was amazing, where you take a a deep breath in.

1:05:54 Or this is my interpretation of it.

1:05:55 You can correct me if I've got any of it uh wrong.

1:05:59 And then you just count to 10.

1:06:01 You keep counting to 10 and and you know,

1:06:03 cuz you're trying to get a maximum exhale.

1:06:06 And it's phenomenal because at the end of it, you really feel your abs.

1:06:10 You feel, "Oh wow, I very, very rarely exhale to that level." Can you talk

1:06:16 a little bit about why exhaling is so important,

1:06:21 why a lot of our problems come from our inability to exhale properly,

1:06:25 and why that exercise is so useful?

1:06:28 Carl Stough was a choral conductor.

1:06:30 He taught singers how to sing better.

1:06:32 He ended up train retraining opera singers at the Met Met Opera.

1:06:36 So, part of what he was doing was

1:06:39 teaching these different people to take a full exhale.

1:06:42 So, the diaphragm is this parachute-shaped

1:06:46 muscle that sits underneath the lungs.

1:06:48 And when we inhale, it flexes down like that.

1:06:52 And when we exhale, it relaxes.

1:06:56 [sighs] And it pushes air out.

1:06:58 So, we're supposed to have a lot of movement in this diaphragm.

1:07:01 It's supposed to be going all the way down when we inhale.

1:07:06 It's supposed to be going up when we exhale.

1:07:08 Most of us have very limited movement.

1:07:11 Carl Stough found that we use about 10%

1:07:15 of our ability to flex that diaphragm, 10%.

1:07:18 Most people walking around the street,

1:07:20 which means we're just breathing like this.

1:07:26 [laughter] And if we do that, we have to engage other muscles to um

1:07:30 to uh sort of work with our lungs to push that air in and out.

1:07:34 And this is why people tend to put their shoulders up,

1:07:38 why they tense their necks.

1:07:39 So, Stough was brought in to the VA hospitals

1:07:43 on the East Coast to rehabilitate people with emphysema in the '60s.

1:07:48 And these are people who were literally left to die.

1:07:51 We had no idea what to do with them.

1:07:53 So, emphysema is under the umbrella of COPD now.

1:07:57 So, what what he found and what one

1:08:00 of the doctors had realized is these people with emphysema,

1:08:04 their diaphragms were locked, literally locked,

1:08:07 and they were locked on this deep inhale.

1:08:10 So, they could not exhale air.

1:08:13 Wow.

1:08:13 So, when they breathed, they just had to go [snorts]

1:08:20 That's how much they could breathe.

1:08:21 So, they had to take 30, 40 breaths a minute.

1:08:24 We know what that does for stress levels.

1:08:26 Also, you're using all of your energy

1:08:29 just to breathe in this extremely inefficient way.

1:08:32 And this is why they were having so many

1:08:34 problems in their lungs because the air wasn't turning over.

1:08:37 That stale air was sitting there.

1:08:39 So, he realized the problem,

1:08:41 and through a series of different massage techniques and breathing techniques,

1:08:46 he was able to unlock their diaphragms, allow them to fully exhale.

1:08:51 And if you fully exhale, guess what?

1:08:54 You're able to fully inhale.

1:08:56 Yeah.

1:08:57 And without any drugs, through these breathing techniques,

1:09:01 he was able to completely rehabilitate people with emphysema.

1:09:05 That doctors had never seen anything like this.

1:09:07 And he spent a decade in these hospitals working every day

1:09:11 of the week to do this, thousands and thousands of patients.

1:09:15 And when he left the hospitals after all that time,

1:09:19 all of his techniques were completely forgotten and have not been used since.

1:09:23 They were never disproven.

1:09:25 Nobody has ever disproven them because they work.

1:09:28 They were forgotten and they just moved on and emphysemics and people with COPD

1:09:32 are basically treated the same way they were in the 50s and 60s right now.

1:09:36 Yeah, I mean that was I was sitting there incredible reading that.

1:09:40 And you know, I think back to my junior doctor days and you know,

1:09:46 when I was in respiratory and the wards were just full of people

1:09:53 with emphysema and they were they were struggling to breathe and um you know,

1:09:57 their lives look really really really difficult.

1:10:00 And if you think about it on a macro

1:10:02 level from what you've been talking about today,

1:10:04 if you're only using 10% of your diaphragm's capacity if you

1:10:09 just think about the the moving of air in and out,

1:10:11 the flow, you know, there's going to be a stagnation in the body.

1:10:15 Things are not going to properly be moving in and out as they should do, right?

1:10:20 And of course, just learning how to fully exhale you will fully inhale

1:10:26 after a full exhale because that's the only thing that can happen, right?

1:10:30 Was he not the guy who also then started to work with sprinters and athletes?

1:10:35 And one of the things I thought I might try at park run this Saturday

1:10:39 is I think he said on the starting gun maybe not for sprinters because you know,

1:10:44 if it's a 10-second race, you know,

1:10:46 you haven't got much time to be messing around,

1:10:48 but I think for some of his athletes on the starting gun, do a full exhale.

1:10:52 That's right.

1:10:52 And I thought, wow, I've never heard that before.

1:10:54 What a lovely way to start off your race

1:10:58 or your run in a relaxed way taking a full breath.

1:11:03 A full exhale and then your first breath you

1:11:05 are breathing in and you are ready to go.

1:11:07 Yeah.

1:11:08 So, with the teams that he coached went on to win more medals

1:11:12 at the Olympics than I still to this day than than anybody else.

1:11:16 And they were able to do this in Mexico City

1:11:19 at a very high elevation where all the other teams

1:11:21 were using oxygen the US team was not using oxygen

1:11:25 and they busted all these records and won all these medals.

1:11:29 And the runners acknowledged,

1:11:31 they said we could only do this through the power of exhalation.

1:11:35 Because that power of exhaling, allowing that diaphragm to come up,

1:11:39 allowed you to take that [snorts] full and rich breath in.

1:11:43 Do you think some people, you know,

1:11:44 we want to keep things free and accessible to as many people as possible

1:11:49 but also sometimes if there's something else out there that could be helpful,

1:11:52 we should also say for people who can afford it or do have access if

1:11:57 you've been dysfunctionally breathing for decades presumably there's

1:12:02 all kinds of tightnesses in your you know,

1:12:05 your rib muscles, your intercostals, the fascia.

1:12:08 I'm saying this because I've had experience, you know,

1:12:10 I've been into breath work for many years now

1:12:12 and I know certain body workers have been incredibly useful

1:12:16 at freeing up certain bits of tightness and tension

1:12:19 where frankly I I I thought I was breathing deeply,

1:12:22 but because let's say the right side of my ribs was tight,

1:12:25 I wasn't even I wasn't going there.

1:12:27 I was breathing deeply everywhere else.

1:12:29 And it was only like when my friend Christian who

1:12:31 does myofascial release helped me release that, I was like,

1:12:34 oh now I can breathe into my right lower ribs.

1:12:38 What's your experience with that?

1:12:39 Can that be helpful for people?

1:12:41 Absolutely.

1:12:42 I've had the same experiences too.

1:12:44 I exercise a lot, I surf a lot,

1:12:46 I get beat up constantly in the water and without

1:12:49 having that restoration from people who really know fascia.

1:12:52 Right?

1:12:52 Muscles are important, but but are able to manipulate fascia.

1:12:56 And this is not when you think of massages,

1:12:58 this is not like, oh, here's your hot stones so [laughter] painful.

1:13:03 It's so painful for an hour.

1:13:05 I'm sitting there sweating and and trying to hold back a scream.

1:13:09 But then afterwards, how do you feel, right?

1:13:11 Yeah, but it's not just such things, is it?

1:13:13 It's also about going back to this idea of doing the work, right?

1:13:16 So in theory, let's say very simplistic, you had some right lower rib tightness.

1:13:24 And you've got a breathing pattern that has

1:13:25 developed for a number of years around that.

1:13:28 Let's say you can afford to get a good

1:13:30 body worker in who does some work on that.

1:13:34 In theory, if that's all you do and then you don't change anything,

1:13:38 it might return Yeah.

1:13:40 because you're going back to the same breathing patterns.

1:13:43 So it's much better to also be proactive and go, yeah,

1:13:47 get that if you've got access to it

1:13:49 and then really think about how you're breathing.

1:13:52 Are you getting into all parts of you?

1:13:54 And of course, if you have a practitioner and the truth is,

1:13:56 you know all yoga classes will have breathing as part of them.

1:14:00 All Pilates classes will have breathing as part of them and and many other,

1:14:05 you know, martial arts, many other disciplines because the breath is so

1:14:09 fundamental to how you operate in all of them.

1:14:12 Andrew Weil, the famous integrative doctor, right?

1:14:16 I was having a chat with him.

1:14:18 I went out to Arizona spoke at his foundation.

1:14:21 We had a chat with him and he asked me a question.

1:14:24 He said why do people get scoliosis?

1:14:27 And I thought about it and I said, uh uh must be genetic.

1:14:31 Well, that that plays a factor.

1:14:33 Oh, must be this, must be that.

1:14:35 I said, I I don't know why.

1:14:37 You know, you're you're the pro here.

1:14:38 He said, nobody knows.

1:14:41 Nobody knows.

1:14:41 All these they're genetics play some role in it.

1:14:45 It's mostly environmental.

1:14:47 And what he told me is he believes because he heard this from his mentor that we

1:14:53 develop dysfunctional breathing habits when we're young.

1:14:56 We sleep in a certain position.

1:14:58 One side is not opened, right?

1:15:00 The way it should be.

1:15:02 We quickly develop, we keep breathing this way.

1:15:05 If you [snorts] were to tilt to your left right now and breathe,

1:15:10 so your right lung is going to constantly

1:15:13 inflate and deflate and then your left is not.

1:15:16 And if you do this at these stages of quick

1:15:18 development this can change the shape of your spine.

1:15:23 So, he mentioned that because he believes

1:15:28 that these dysfunctional breathing habits could contribute to scoliosis,

1:15:33 you could also use healthy proper

1:15:37 biomechanical breathing to restore to restore scoliosis,

1:15:42 which is exactly what we've seen.

1:15:44 And you wrote about with Katharina Schroth, yeah.

1:15:47 Right?

1:15:47 German teenager with scoliosis who breathed herself straight.

1:15:50 Now, I need to acknowledge as I'm saying

1:15:53 this that this is not the conventional view, right?

1:15:57 In within medicine.

1:15:58 No.

1:15:59 But where I have a real problem sometimes with the way

1:16:02 we do science or talk about medicine is research is important.

1:16:07 And we absolutely must look at the research and the science.

1:16:09 But then when you have case studies that disprove

1:16:13 something that you thought to be true, i.e.

1:16:16 oh, that person has actually reversed their type 2 diabetes maybe then we

1:16:21 can't say that for every single person

1:16:23 type 2 diabetes is chronic and irreversible.

1:16:26 You know, it may be that for some people for some people it is.

1:16:29 But as soon as you've disproved it with one case

1:16:33 it's like hold on a minute our knowledge is only partial.

1:16:37 There must there must be something out there.

1:16:39 Maybe we can study this and figure out, well, what's going on there?

1:16:42 And I know many body work practitioners.

1:16:45 I had Jason Van Bruggen recently from Human Garage.

1:16:48 They will tell you that with the practices

1:16:50 they do that they have reversed certain scoliosises.

1:16:54 Right?

1:16:55 Now they've seen that.

1:16:57 I've seen that, right?

1:16:58 So, it clearly is possible, but it's not mainstream practice.

1:17:03 So, I feel I have an ethical responsibility as a doctor

1:17:06 to share that stuff on this podcast to go,

1:17:07 listen you know, maybe you won't be able to do it.

1:17:10 Maybe you don't know someone near you who can help you.

1:17:13 But I would just encourage them to read the exhale chapter,

1:17:16 read Katharina's story and go wow, that was because she helped loads of people

1:17:20 to do it after she did it herself, right?

1:17:22 Hundreds and hundreds.

1:17:23 And she was repeatedly for decades they tried to ban

1:17:27 her from doing this cuz she was not a doctor.

1:17:30 Right?

1:17:30 She she was a a quote hobbyist that was doing this.

1:17:33 And yet she kept restoring thousands hundreds and hundreds,

1:17:37 thousands and thousands of women restoring their their scoliosis.

1:17:41 And at the end of her life, she lived to be 90.

1:17:43 At the end of her life the German government

1:17:46 awarded her an award for medicine for her contributions.

1:17:51 Yeah.

1:17:51 [laughter] It also takes someone who's suffering Yeah.

1:17:54 to disprove it, right?

1:17:55 That's right.

1:17:56 Because no one's going to do that if you're well.

1:17:58 Yeah.

1:17:58 If you're well, you have no reason.

1:17:59 And I wish I knew this I was really thinking man,

1:18:01 I wish I knew this 20 years ago cuz my mom's

1:18:03 had a really bad scoliosis which just got progressively worse

1:18:06 throughout her life and I remember after my dad died

1:18:09 taking mom to all these spinal surgeon appointments and you know,

1:18:13 it was all x-rays and you know, is surgery an option?

1:18:16 And and again the doctors were doing their job, Mhm.

1:18:20 right?

1:18:21 The way they've been trained to do it.

1:18:23 But if I knew then what I know now, I might have gone, hey mom, you know what?

1:18:28 [gasps] Maybe we should just look at getting you some myofascial release,

1:18:31 say um a breath work expert.

1:18:34 So, you know, who knows?

1:18:35 I don't know that that would have made a difference, but then, of course.

1:18:39 But it's interesting, isn't it?

1:18:40 I think those two things.

1:18:42 It's I didn't think that we were going

1:18:43 to bridge the gap between emphysema and scoliosis,

1:18:47 but and they're so similar in ways that they can be exacerbated

1:18:53 and some might even say caused by the same dysfunction in breathing.

1:18:58 Yeah.

1:18:58 This inability to engage the diaphragm to fill both of the lungs equally so

1:19:04 that you develop a straight spine so

1:19:06 that you continue to take fluid and easy breaths.

1:19:10 And I think this combination of myofascial

1:19:13 release along with breath training I mean,

1:19:16 you put those two together and I think it could be very powerful.

1:19:20 So, all you PTs out there I'm a journalist.

1:19:23 I can't do this.

1:19:24 People are going to say,

1:19:24 "Send me more information." But, it seems like this is wide

1:19:28 open for people to start adopting these methods that have been proven,

1:19:33 that have been part of human culture for thousands of years for a reason.

1:19:37 One of the simplest ways to improve your whole

1:19:40 body health is to start with your feet.

1:19:43 Now, most of us don't realize this, but 95% of us are born with healthy feet.

1:19:49 And by adulthood, 77% of us have foot problems.

1:19:53 And a big reason is the shoes that we wear.

1:19:57 Now, most modern shoes are rigid, narrow, and over-cushioned,

1:20:01 which ends up weakening the very muscles that support our posture,

1:20:05 balance, and movement.

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1:21:05 Free your feet, and the rest will follow.

1:21:11 Let's go back breath holds.

1:21:12 Okay.

1:21:13 Um you talk a lot about breath holds in the book, and of course,

1:21:16 a lot of people are aware of a certain

1:21:21 type of breathing practice and breath holds,

1:21:23 you know, Wim Hof breathing, which I think comes from Tummo breathing,

1:21:28 from what I understand in your book.

1:21:29 Um but I wanted to take breath hold

1:21:33 in a slightly different direction with you, James.

1:21:35 We've we've we've covered the Wim Hof breathing

1:21:38 stuff before when you've been on the show,

1:21:39 and I think I don't think it's for everyone.

1:21:41 Um I think it can be very helpful for some people,

1:21:44 and I think the key message you're trying to get across

1:21:46 in this conversation is before you go to these fancy breathing techniques,

1:21:52 get your foundation sorted.

1:21:54 Make sure you're nasal breathing.

1:21:55 Make sure you can do that slow,

1:21:57 quiet breath in for 5 or 6 seconds, out for 5 or 6 seconds.

1:22:03 The breath hold I want to talk to you about,

1:22:05 and it's it really it'll be interesting to get your take

1:22:07 on this, especially because you wrote a book on freediving,

1:22:09 I think, prior to uh the book on breathing.

1:22:15 This idea that it's rising CO2 levels,

1:22:18 carbon dioxide levels, that is ultimately our drive to breathe.

1:22:21 Okay.

1:22:23 Now, where I was challenged with that was when

1:22:26 I did a breath hold course with Ido Portal.

1:22:30 I don't know if you know Ido or not.

1:22:31 He's the founder of MovNat, a natural movement um kind of training organization.

1:22:39 He's been teaching people to do natural primal movements uh for years,

1:22:42 but over the last years, I think inspired by freediving,

1:22:46 he's been doing what he calls breath hold work meditation.

1:22:52 And I did his online course, and on the very first session,

1:22:55 he asked everyone on this Zoom call to take a breath in, you know,

1:22:59 as much as you can, and then hold it for as long as you can.

1:23:03 And you know, I had just landed in Sweden.

1:23:05 I was I'd rushed to the hotel room,

1:23:07 and so there's all kinds of other factors at play here,

1:23:09 but I could hold my breath for about a minute before I had to breathe again.

1:23:15 4 weeks later, I could do 4 minutes and 20 seconds.

1:23:21 Hyperventilation did not play a role at all.

1:23:25 Right?

1:23:25 So, his viewpoint is that do you know, I don't want to speak for Ido,

1:23:29 but he would argue that doing breath holds after you've done

1:23:34 hyperventilation is like doing cold plunge with your wet suit on.

1:23:39 Right?

1:23:40 So, his take on it is that yeah, you sure you can do that, but of course,

1:23:43 as you well know, when you do that hyperventilation,

1:23:46 you're blowing off carbon dioxide, so therefore,

1:23:49 it's easier to hold your breath because it takes longer for that CO2 to rise,

1:23:53 which I get, I understand.

1:23:57 What I learned on that course is that when

1:24:01 your body is screaming for you to take a breath,

1:24:05 literally everything you do, going back to what you said before,

1:24:08 your emotions, your thoughts, every part of the more noisy you are,

1:24:14 the more that urge to breathe will be there,

1:24:16 and he trains us to really quieten and calm our mind.

1:24:23 I mean, even as I say it, I find it unbelievable, but I have done this, right?

1:24:28 [clears throat]

1:24:28 I'm like, "Oh my god." Like, at 1 minute 30 when you think you have to breathe,

1:24:32 you may well have another 2 minutes there.

1:24:34 You just don't know.

1:24:35 Now, I'm not suggesting anyone does this without supervision, right?

1:24:38 I'm absolutely not saying that.

1:24:41 That course, James, for me was life-changing

1:24:45 because it taught me something very, very important.

1:24:47 It taught me that actually, if I can master the skill of controlling my mind

1:24:54 when my body is screaming to take a breath,

1:24:59 I'm like, well, most things in life relative

1:25:01 to that are going to be a piece of cake.

1:25:02 And I honestly think that that course has helped me like,

1:25:06 I just feel pretty calm a lot of the time these days.

1:25:10 I I don't feel that stuff that used to trigger me triggers me as much,

1:25:14 and there's many things I've done to help me,

1:25:16 but I think that course is one part of the picture.

1:25:19 So, have you heard of anything like that before?

1:25:23 What's your take on it?

1:25:25 And also, I guess that challenged my view that it's

1:25:29 only carbon dioxide that is our drive to breathe.

1:25:33 I thought, yes, it is, and there's a psychological component as well.

1:25:38 These practices have been a part of various cultures for a long, long time.

1:25:44 Ancient Chinese practices of breath holding are

1:25:47 foundational to early versions of Qigong, right?

1:25:51 There's one practice in which they want you to inhale and then

1:25:56 exhale and hold your breath counting one and two 100 times.

1:26:01 That's the initial test, right?

1:26:03 And they said, "If you're able to do that 1,000 times,

1:26:07 which works out to around a breath hold of 8 minutes,

1:26:10 depending on how fast you are,

1:26:13 then you will be in really enlightened state, right?

1:26:16 Not only physically, but but spiritually and mentally." So,

1:26:21 it doesn't shock me that you had that reaction to it.

1:26:25 Um the course sounds great.

1:26:26 I've done a lot of freediving courses.

1:26:28 I still freedive, and breathing, of course, is fundamental.

1:26:32 foundational for this.

1:26:33 It It you can't hold your breath unless you're a good breather.

1:26:37 Some of those uh over-breathing techniques can be beneficial.

1:26:41 Not not for freediving, they can be very dangerous.

1:26:44 But um for Wim Hof technique, for Sudarshan Kriya,

1:26:48 for uh holotropic breath work, for various pranayamas, uh so,

1:26:54 those can be very beneficial because what

1:26:56 you do is you purposely stress yourself out,

1:26:59 and then you purposely calm yourself down.

1:27:02 So, you put yourself in control of your nervous system.

1:27:06 And what they found with Wim Hof method,

1:27:08 also known as the 2,000-year-old practice of Tummo, [laughter] you know,

1:27:13 is that this can be very effective for people with autoimmune diseases,

1:27:17 that in combination with cold exposure.

1:27:19 So, we all we know all that.

1:27:21 And what dictates our need to breathe is that rising level of CO2.

1:27:26 I always thought it was oxygen myself.

1:27:28 It's not.

1:27:29 It's rising levels of CO2.

1:27:31 Once you start to understand that, I found it very helpful to wear

1:27:36 a monitor on my finger and looking at my blood sats, right?

1:27:40 Because I could hold my breath,

1:27:42 and after about a minute and a half, I'd be like,

1:27:44 "There's no way I have oxygen." And sometimes

1:27:46 it's it's unchanged after that amount of time.

1:27:49 Then it'll a minute 3, minute 4, it will start to go down.

1:27:53 But, you acclimate yourself to this, and you get your body used to it,

1:27:56 and cells want to be stressed, right?

1:27:59 It makes them more resilient.

1:28:01 And the Chinese considered these breath holds

1:28:04 a medicine that can cure a lot of problems.

1:28:07 Has that been proven?

1:28:08 Not in Western science, it hasn't,

1:28:11 but the foundations of that make a lot of sense to me.

1:28:14 Yeah.

1:28:16 It It kind of reminds me a little

1:28:17 bit about the section in your book about anxiety, where for many years,

1:28:21 it was it was believed that the amygdala,

1:28:23 that emotional part of our brain, is in many ways the hub of anxiety.

1:28:30 And it can be.

1:28:32 But, as the experiments with CO2 have shown,

1:28:35 you know, even if you don't have an amygdala,

1:28:37 you can precipitate anxiety in someone by giving them carbon dioxide.

1:28:42 Right?

1:28:42 So, it's kind of like And I I see a similar

1:28:44 thing with what I learned on that breath hold course,

1:28:47 which is yeah, rising CO2 levels are the stimulus to breathe, absolutely true.

1:28:53 And there is also a psychological component.

1:28:57 So, maybe what I did with Ido over those weeks

1:29:00 was use my mind to go a bit further,

1:29:05 and maybe start training myself to actually tolerate

1:29:09 higher levels of CO2 before I needed to breathe.

1:29:12 So, a lot of that is mental, but I think that tolerating more CO2,

1:29:17 which is good thing for a lot of people.

1:29:19 Having a higher tolerance for CO2 absolutely good,

1:29:23 especially with people with asthma and anxiety.

1:29:26 When I was researching with Dr.

1:29:28 Justin Feinstein, this was his main jam was to look at people.

1:29:32 He focuses more on panic and anxiety,

1:29:35 but he still was was experimenting with people with asthma.

1:29:38 He found that all of them are over-breathing and all

1:29:42 of them have a very low tolerance for CO2.

1:29:45 That means if you ask an asthmatic or someone with panic to hold their breath,

1:29:51 [snorts] they'll take an inhale and a few seconds later [panting]

1:29:54 Yeah, about 4 to 5 seconds.

1:29:56 That's how long they could hold their breath and he found that the longer

1:30:01 they were able to comfortably tolerate that CO2 up to 20 seconds,

1:30:07 30 seconds, eventually 40, 50, their symptoms of asthma and panic

1:30:13 and anxiety started to precipitously decrease.

1:30:17 Yeah.

1:30:17 And this has been in the literature for actually 50, 60 years.

1:30:21 Researchers, renowned researchers have been writing about

1:30:24 this and now he has a hypothesis.

1:30:26 I hope he's going to be able to do

1:30:28 more research to prove this, that he believes anxiety,

1:30:32 the main driver to it, the primary driver is breathing.

1:30:36 Yeah.

1:30:38 So, he had also told me um various uh

1:30:42 psychiatrists and psychologists had had told me this as well,

1:30:45 that you can never fix anxiety.

1:30:48 No matter what retreats you go to, what pills you take,

1:30:52 what powders you're taking,

1:30:54 unless you first fix that foundational breathing aspect.

1:30:58 So, if you're breathing dysfunctionally, over-breathing all the time,

1:31:01 very low CO2, doesn't matter what else you do.

1:31:05 Not going to say that breathing's going to fix all of those issues,

1:31:08 but it starts there and then you move up the ladder.

1:31:14 Yeah.

1:31:14 There's also something about agency and autonomy that I

1:31:20 think comes when you engage in these practices, James.

1:31:22 So, that breath work course I did with Awin,

1:31:27 at the end of it I felt so empowered.

1:31:30 I was like, "Wow, in the last few

1:31:32 weeks I've literally learned how to control and quieten

1:31:35 my mind when my body is screaming to breathe."

1:31:39 That self-empowerment absolutely bleeds into how you feel about yourself,

1:31:46 how you interact in various aspects of your life.

1:31:49 That's why I'm such a big fan of people doing things proactively

1:31:51 for their health and well-being because I

1:31:52 don't think it's just about the practice.

1:31:55 It's about you gaining that knowledge that, "Oh,

1:31:58 I can do stuff that makes a difference." Do you know what I mean?

1:32:02 And I think that's what breath work can give people.

1:32:03 It's like, "Oh, wow, I I feel stressed, I do 3 minutes of just slow breathing,

1:32:09 6 minutes in 6 seconds in 6 seconds out, now I feel calm.

1:32:14 Oh, I didn't need to buy anything, I didn't need to distract myself on my phone,

1:32:18 I didn't need to put something on Netflix.

1:32:20 Just me, myself with how I change my breath.

1:32:24 It's very, very empowering.

1:32:26 You're also doing something when you're free

1:32:28 diving that is supposed to be impossible.

1:32:31 And that's the thing that really blew my mind and and inspired me to go

1:32:36 on this journey to learn about breathing over the course of 10 years is,

1:32:41 according to so many physicists and so many biologists,

1:32:45 the lowest a human was supposed to be able

1:32:48 to dive before their lungs would implode was 100 feet.

1:32:52 They said, "You can't go lower." What they didn't know is we

1:32:55 are imbued with these different reflexes that kick in the deeper we go.

1:33:02 That have been [clears throat] lying dormant in us,

1:33:04 but are still there and when they kick in, it

1:33:07 allows us to become underwater animals for a little while.

1:33:12 And once you start using your natural body,

1:33:15 these two scuba tanks called the lungs inside

1:33:18 of us and going down and swimming with dolphins

1:33:21 and whales and doing this thing that's supposed

1:33:24 to be impossible and the deeper you go down, you feel these different triggers,

1:33:29 these ancient triggers automatically coming on.

1:33:32 It just blows my mind.

1:33:34 One of the funniest things about your book for me

1:33:38 is the stories from ancient Indian culture and ancient

1:33:44 Chinese culture and essentially just making the case

1:33:48 that a lot of this stuff was known by our ancestors.

1:33:53 They may not have had modern scientific data, but it was known, right?

1:33:59 And it was funny, I I spoke to my mom yesterday.

1:34:01 I said, "Hey mom, I'm talking to this guy James tomorrow about breathing.

1:34:05 When did you" My mom grew up in India.

1:34:07 I said, "When did you first learn about

1:34:10 the power of breathing?" She couldn't quite remember.

1:34:11 She said, "Well, I think I was about 7 or 8." And you know,

1:34:16 I think someone in the family taught her a breathing practice.

1:34:20 And it makes me think about culture and it's

1:34:24 kind of imbued in in the subtitle of your book,

1:34:26 The New Science of a Lost Art, right?

1:34:30 This stuff has been in so many cultures for so long.

1:34:34 Certainly in, you know, my heritage of being in an Indian family, you know,

1:34:39 I grew up seeing my granddad meditate for 20 minutes twice a day.

1:34:43 Right?

1:34:43 I spoke to Henry Shukman Adams recently when he was on the podcast saying,

1:34:46 "Hey, I really didn't need convincing growing up that meditation was good.

1:34:50 It was just surrounding me in my culture that breath work is important,

1:34:54 meditation is important.

1:34:56 And for me it's really fun that there's now lots

1:34:59 of this modern science that is kind of, you know,

1:35:03 validating in some ways what these cultures have known for thousands of years."

1:35:09 I think that the further we get away from nature, the sicker we get.

1:35:14 This is certainly what's happened.

1:35:16 We stop moving and we start sitting

1:35:19 and we start spending 90% of our time indoors.

1:35:23 We start breathing air that isn't healthy.

1:35:26 We start eating ultra-processed foods.

1:35:29 This makes us sicker and sicker.

1:35:30 I just think it's so interesting that medicine is now finding

1:35:34 once you start peeling away the industrial age from our bodies,

1:35:42 something amazing happens.

1:35:45 [snorts] They're able to restore themselves and seek this this balance.

1:35:49 They want to do This is what we're designed to do.

1:35:52 We're designed to be stressed out, but we're also designed to heal.

1:35:57 We're healing every moment of of our lives.

1:36:00 You see that with sleep, you know, the idea of now the the biggest thing

1:36:05 that people are looking for is just quiet and darkness.

1:36:10 This This is the most expensive thing,

1:36:12 the hardest thing to find in the modern world, trust me.

1:36:15 I keep looking for it in hotels, I never find it.

1:36:18 Well, funnily enough,

1:36:19 I I was looking this week cuz I'm traveling in a couple of weeks and I

1:36:21 was looking for a hotel the hotel I

1:36:25 was looking at, it is a wellness hotel, right?

1:36:28 I was just looking to see how much it

1:36:29 was and and but the the more expensive rooms, do you know what they're saying?

1:36:33 They're saying, "In this room now you can have, you know,

1:36:36 we've got an air filter, we've got a blackout blinds.

1:36:39 Um you know, that is the premium room now." It's like,

1:36:42 you can have a noisy room,

1:36:44 but if you want a a premium room that we would have had out in nature,

1:36:48 you've got to pay for that.

1:36:49 That's why I find so ironic um in this culture is you have to pay more for less.

1:36:56 The laundry detergent that doesn't have crap fragrance in it

1:36:59 costs twice as much as the detergent that smells like crap.

1:37:03 The food that is not processed, that is in its natural state,

1:37:07 costs way more than Cheetos down down at the local market.

1:37:11 And I to me it's this awareness is a good thing.

1:37:15 Right?

1:37:15 It's It's that you don't have to spend an incredible amount of money or effort.

1:37:20 You just think about the further I go in this direction into industrialization,

1:37:27 from the lighting in our houses to the air quality again,

1:37:31 whatever, the the worse we're we're going to be.

1:37:34 Um and now if you think of like wellness places,

1:37:38 you think about people like 200 years ago,

1:37:40 like where they would want to go is the city.

1:37:43 I want to see the bright lights.

1:37:44 I want to be around the people.

1:37:45 I want to eat the food.

1:37:47 I want to see the buildings.

1:37:48 Now the exact opposite has happened with the wealthy.

1:37:52 I go to my own island where it's it's all natural lighting, you know,

1:37:56 I go to a retreat center that allows me

1:37:59 to be encompassed in nature the whole time and um

1:38:04 I I go I go to a retreat where they take my phone off me when I go.

1:38:08 my phone off me.

1:38:09 The food is unprocessed.

1:38:11 I eat fruit from trees and vegetables from the ground.

1:38:17 And so I I think that it's intuitive.

1:38:19 Again, that's one of those things that doesn't take

1:38:21 a huge leap of logic to see how that makes sense.

1:38:25 Our body can digest food that's been less ultra-processed, right?

1:38:29 You know, we can sleep better in the dark

1:38:31 when it's quiet and we can breathe better

1:38:33 when we're not surrounded in really tight clothes

1:38:37 and sitting in front of a desk all day.

1:38:39 Yeah.

1:38:40 One of the new sections in the paperback

1:38:42 is to do with carbon dioxide levels inside.

1:38:47 I know you've got this monitor with you cuz you

1:38:49 checked my kitchen and I was delighted that it was decent.

1:38:54 What's going on?

1:38:55 What have you learned since the original publication about indoor air

1:38:58 quality and why is it important that we know about it?

1:39:01 What I've learned is that uh this is something that I did not know about

1:39:05 when I first wrote this book and luckily

1:39:07 I've been able to speak at various conferences,

1:39:09 talk to more experts and they kept telling me,

1:39:11 they're like, "You have to look at indoor air quality.

1:39:13 I said, why?

1:39:14 And they said, because there is an epidemic

1:39:16 of high carbon dioxide in indoor air.

1:39:20 So, people say, wait, I thought you just said having higher levels

1:39:23 of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream is a good thing.

1:39:26 It is.

1:39:27 It's all about balance.

1:39:28 When you're creating the CO2 within your body, okay?

1:39:33 Then your body knows what to do with it.

1:39:35 It comes on slowly.

1:39:36 You can acclimate to it.

1:39:38 When you sense high levels of carbon dioxide in the environment,

1:39:43 your body views this as a threat.

1:39:45 It's not breath holding, right?

1:39:46 In the in the sense that if you're holding your breath unconsciously because,

1:39:52 I don't know, you're looking at your emails.

1:39:53 We're We're not mentioning email apnea yet, but, you know,

1:39:55 where you hold your breath when you're looking at these emails, right?

1:39:59 That's a breath hold of sorts.

1:40:00 You're not meaning to do it.

1:40:02 The environment is resulting in you doing it.

1:40:06 That's very different, isn't it,

1:40:07 from when you intentionally decide, you know what,

1:40:09 I'm going to try and now hold my breath

1:40:12 for 2 minutes instead of a minute by calming my mind.

1:40:15 So, you know what Do you know what I mean?

1:40:16 It's It's a similar kind of principle.

1:40:17 One is conscious and one is acute, right?

1:40:20 So, you are consciously holding your breath for a short amount of time.

1:40:23 You are controlling that.

1:40:25 When you are in an environment for hours or days at a time with high CO2 levels,

1:40:31 your body has to struggle to keep the blood pH consistent.

1:40:35 As you know, as a doctor, you have to stay at the same pH.

1:40:39 All All cells work at a very specific pH, 7.38 to 7.42, right?

1:40:45 So, you have to be in that range.

1:40:47 And if you're not, your body will keep you alive,

1:40:50 but it has to do all this extra work, right?

1:40:53 Your kidneys have to work harder.

1:40:55 It starts pulling minerals from from your bones.

1:40:58 You have to release bicarbonate.

1:40:59 Like, whatever.

1:41:00 All of these different things have to happen.

1:41:02 So, for a short amount of time, it's fine.

1:41:05 But, chronically, we know that there are so many issues associated with it.

1:41:09 When I started doing the deep dive in the research,

1:41:11 there are governments all over the world that have

1:41:13 been doing these studies for 20, 30 years.

1:41:16 So, again, it's not controversial.

1:41:18 But, then you go and start measuring it.

1:41:21 We have the science,

1:41:23 but the measurements of these indoor environments are an absolute disaster.

1:41:27 Why is it so bad indoors?

1:41:29 So, what happens is before, back in the day,

1:41:33 we used to have these amazing things,

1:41:34 this incredible technology [laughter] called windows.

1:41:38 And when it was stuffy in a room, I'm going to open the window.

1:41:42 So, that window allows fresh air in.

1:41:45 So, then we had this idea.

1:41:46 We're like, let's remove all windows from all

1:41:49 hotels and all offices and conference centers,

1:41:54 and we're going to pump in air, okay?

1:41:56 We're going to heat that air or cool it down depending on where we are.

1:41:59 We're going to pump it in, then we're going to pump it back out.

1:42:02 In theory, that works fine as long as you're pumping that air in and out.

1:42:06 And what so many hotels and so many schools do are

1:42:10 doing is pumping in air and out and and in heating it.

1:42:15 So, that requires an incredible amount of energy,

1:42:17 about 50% of the energy cost, right?

1:42:20 So, what they're doing is they're bringing in a small

1:42:23 amount of air and they're recycling it throughout the rooms.

1:42:27 So, that they don't have to spend any money cooling it down or heating it up.

1:42:31 So, you think you're alone in your room,

1:42:33 you are breathing the air from the person next door,

1:42:36 the person next door to them.

1:42:38 So much so that in some hotels, we found that around one in every 20

1:42:44 to 25 breaths you're taking is someone else's exhalation.

1:42:48 And if you go to the window to open it up, guess what?

1:42:52 Doesn't matter if you're at a wellness hotel.

1:42:55 Some of those are the worst, by the way.

1:42:57 You can't open the window up.

1:42:59 You cannot get fresh air into this room.

1:43:02 So, right now, in the outdoor environment,

1:43:05 there's around 428 parts per million of CO2.

1:43:10 Okay, we know that.

1:43:10 It goes up every year.

1:43:12 In indoor environments,

1:43:14 once you get to a level of around 1,500 parts per million of CO2, so,

1:43:20 three three four times the amount that's in the outdoor,

1:43:23 some studies have shown a 50% decrease in cognitive performance.

1:43:29 Cuz your body is under stress.

1:43:31 If you get to 2,500 parts per million per million,

1:43:35 that's about one in every 25 breaths is someone else's exhalation.

1:43:40 That starts increasing precipitously.

1:43:42 Headaches, fatigue, even high blood pressure.

1:43:46 By the time you get to 3,000 and 4,000, you're at around one in 10 to one

1:43:53 in 12 breaths you're taking is someone else's exhalation.

1:43:57 And this is when some very serious problems

1:43:59 can occur And just to be really clear,

1:44:01 for someone who who doesn't understand why that's an issue,

1:44:04 why does it matter if one in 10 breaths is someone else's exhalation?

1:44:08 It makes it harder for you to get oxygen.

1:44:10 That CO2 is taking up the area that oxygen would otherwise be in.

1:44:14 So, your body is struggling to get oxygen, and it is all that CO2 is sending

1:44:20 these constant signals to your brain that you are stressed,

1:44:23 that there is danger afoot.

1:44:25 And for your body to balance that pH, again,

1:44:30 all of these different functions have to happen in the body.

1:44:32 And if it's chronic, it can start pulling minerals Yeah.

1:44:35 in into out of your body, and it can relate to high blood pressure, as well.

1:44:41 What is the monitor you carry around?

1:44:43 Cuz I'm sure people I don't know how expensive it is,

1:44:45 but I'm sure some people will want to get

1:44:47 it and check their own house and and office environments.

1:44:50 So, once I was talking with the researcher about this, I

1:44:52 went and researched all of these different carbon dioxide meters.

1:44:56 And you can buy them on Amazon, and most of them are complete crap.

1:45:00 So, they're very inaccurate.

1:45:01 So, I got a professional machine, and I tested a bunch.

1:45:04 I'm not affiliated with this company.

1:45:06 I'm not associated.

1:45:06 Maybe maybe I should have been.

1:45:08 I don't get any money from but I found one that that worked really well.

1:45:12 So, for the past around 3 years, I've been traveling with this.

1:45:16 Every airplane, every hotel, uh some restaurants.

1:45:20 And now I've armed about 20 other people

1:45:22 to travel with this, um one of these monitors,

1:45:25 and we're creating a database so that people know what's going on.

1:45:28 I have brought this monitor here to this studio.

1:45:33 Well, let's see what the studio is, shall we?

1:45:36 I hate to say this, the worst air quality I've ever seen in a studio.

1:45:42 We're going to fix this afterwards.

1:45:44 I'm going to tell you exactly what to do.

1:45:46 It's a quick and easy fix.

1:45:48 But, this means that the air we are breathing right now,

1:45:52 one in every about 15 or so breaths is my exhalation,

1:45:57 the sound guy's exhalation.

1:46:00 Um that is that is what you're breathing.

1:46:01 not good.

1:46:01 I'm looking at Gareth.

1:46:02 Gareth, we're not in a good situation here.

1:46:04 if one of us is is sick,

1:46:06 there's a much higher chance that this is going to, you know,

1:46:12 be breathed in by the other person.

1:46:14 This is interesting, right?

1:46:15 So, you did my um kitchen, which is about 800, which is fantastic.

1:46:21 Really good.

1:46:21 And and so, and Let's just stick with the kitchen for a minute.

1:46:24 If I wanted to bring that down in the kitchen,

1:46:27 if you open the the windows and the doors, Yeah.

1:46:30 that would just naturally come down.

1:46:31 In a couple of minutes, it would be it would be it's 400 outdoors.

1:46:35 Yes.

1:46:36 It just being indoors with shut windows

1:46:39 and not having that fresh sort of you know,

1:46:42 not I guess the stale-ness of the air, it's going to rise.

1:46:46 It's going to rise.

1:46:47 Okay.

1:46:48 But, of course, this studio, which used to be a garage,

1:46:51 uh so, I'm trying to think what it's made of and stuff.

1:46:53 So, okay, yeah.

1:46:54 So, I mean, we can fix it,

1:46:56 but is there anything you can say about how to fix it which would be

1:46:58 useful for people listening in case they

1:47:00 find in their work environments that, you know, they've got poor air quality.

1:47:06 Number one, open a window.

1:47:08 When you go to a hotel, you call beforehand,

1:47:11 do some research, do they have windows that open?

1:47:14 You don't need the window to open all the way.

1:47:16 You need this much.

1:47:17 You need a few inches.

1:47:19 Do they have doors that open?

1:47:20 The hotel I stayed at last night, I asked that.

1:47:23 They had this wonderful door.

1:47:25 Even in Manchester in winter, I slept with that door cracked because I know what

1:47:30 this what a difference it makes to my sleep quality,

1:47:33 and my ability to to think more clearly the next day.

1:47:36 So, a lot of the time when we sleep in a hotel room, we'll often say,

1:47:41 well, I will at least, but I know many people say, I didn't sleep that well.

1:47:44 You know, it's a hotel bed.

1:47:44 And and it could be different environment, it could be the bed,

1:47:48 could be the the light coming through the door, whatever.

1:47:51 All those things, but it could also be the fact

1:47:54 that you're you were sleeping in in a in in really,

1:47:59 I guess, a high carbon dioxide environment.

1:48:01 Yes.

1:48:02 It It is all those things.

1:48:03 So, next door to me, the guy was watching TV and yelling all night, right?

1:48:06 So, so that kept me up.

1:48:08 But, at least I was able to remove the air quality part of this.

1:48:12 I have at hotels, I I won't name them,

1:48:15 certain wellness hotels that a client put me

1:48:17 up at that cost an incredible amount of money.

1:48:20 Gorgeous place, right?

1:48:21 They have ferns, they have natural wood, recycled fabrics.

1:48:26 Worst air quality I've ever seen in my life.

1:48:28 And I woke up that next morning,

1:48:30 I didn't have a thing to drink the night before,

1:48:32 went out to big dinner with a bunch of friends,

1:48:34 didn't drink anything, felt so incredibly hungover.

1:48:37 I said, what is going on?

1:48:39 I reached in my bag, looked at the monitor,

1:48:41 and the CO2 levels were just absolutely off the hook.

1:48:45 I mean, going back to ancient wisdom and and bringing up my mom again,

1:48:50 my mom has always always always slept with the window open.

1:48:54 Yep.

1:48:55 Even when it was, you know,

1:48:56 December and cold and the heating's on, she would always say,

1:48:59 no, I can't sleep unless the windows are open.

1:49:01 So, she'd always keep it open.

1:49:02 And it's quite interesting now to think, well,

1:49:04 maybe she just intuitively knew that or or you know,

1:49:08 that I feel better when I've got airflow in my room, which kind of makes sense.

1:49:14 [laughter] Of course you feel better.

1:49:15 Why wouldn't you feel better?

1:49:16 I mean that that's what's crazy.

1:49:18 This is another thing.

1:49:19 It's so simple.

1:49:20 The good news about this though is it it it's a very fixable problem.

1:49:25 This isn't some systemic thing that's going

1:49:27 to require all of this changing of infrastructure.

1:49:32 Once these hotels start to get outed, the one thing that really speaks is money.

1:49:39 When people stop start saying don't stay at this hotel.

1:49:42 It's $600 a night and the air quality is crap.

1:49:45 You are going to see them improve [clears throat] their HVAC

1:49:48 so quickly and it's not going to cost them that much.

1:49:52 If they really cared about the health of their guests they'd

1:49:56 be pumping in at minimum allow us a breath of fresh air.

1:50:00 One thing I noticed in Vegas, I've done a lot of speaking gigs in Vegas,

1:50:05 the air quality in Vegas rooms, even with windows that do not open, was superb.

1:50:11 Every single hotel room in Vegas was around 600 to 500 parts per million.

1:50:18 god, these guys don't mess around.

1:50:19 do not mess around.

1:50:20 The best air quality I've ever seen in a hotel.

1:50:23 That and you wake up and you're like even though I'm jet lagged,

1:50:28 I I did have a few glasses of wine the night before I feel pretty good.

1:50:33 I'm ready to take on the day.

1:50:34 I'm ready to go see a show.

1:50:37 [laughter] Is the the business case is there?

1:50:38 The business case is there.

1:50:39 That's why I think you can shame people for that's unethical.

1:50:44 That doesn't move things.

1:50:45 I I think that you can show them you're going to lose money.

1:50:49 People are going to stop going to your hotel and you're lying to guests saying

1:50:54 this is a wellness hotel and you won't even allow us a fresh breath of air.

1:50:58 Yeah, I'm definitely getting one of these.

1:50:59 The make of this is an Air Things 4.

1:51:02 So I do not work for Air Things.

1:51:04 I put this sticker on it because I I

1:51:06 noticed I was promoting this product all over the place.

1:51:09 These are right now there's a bunch of other companies coming out with these.

1:51:13 These are the best and I've tested this.

1:51:16 If you were to open your door and if you had a little

1:51:19 fan in about 10 minutes we'd see this drop to 1,000 parts per million.

1:51:24 So which is good, which is really good.

1:51:26 What have you seen on planes?

1:51:28 It depends.

1:51:29 At you wonder why you you go on a plane and people are stressed, right?

1:51:33 When they get on plane.

1:51:34 And then you're like, why is everybody asleep after 5 minutes?

1:51:38 It doesn't have to do with their stress levels.

1:51:40 Has to do with there's so much CO2 that the body just

1:51:43 goes and completely crashes and I think they use this to pacify us.

1:51:49 Some airlines have much better air quality than others,

1:51:52 which shows you again this is a choice that these companies are are making.

1:51:58 Right?

1:51:58 They want to conserve a little money on oxygen, on filtering air.

1:52:03 So some some are much better than others.

1:52:05 I want to get more data before we come out with all of this.

1:52:07 We're going to share all of this information

1:52:09 for free for everyone so you can see.

1:52:12 Some when the airline is before it takes off, right?

1:52:17 They the reason why it gets so hot

1:52:18 in there is the the engines aren't running, right?

1:52:21 Yeah.

1:52:21 And and so the air is in flow.

1:52:23 I've seen 3,500 parts per million right before it takes off.

1:52:27 Once it gets going a bunch of engineers,

1:52:30 the council of engineers suggested anything above

1:52:34 1,000 parts per million is bad news.

1:52:37 It feels like stuffy air.

1:52:39 I have never been on a flight anywhere that wasn't well north of that ever.

1:52:44 This includes a flight that's 14 hours long.

1:52:47 You know, when you think about something like jet lag for example and you know,

1:52:52 we've conventionally put that down to circadian rhythms.

1:52:55 Which of course is huge, right?

1:52:58 But what I've learned over the past years,

1:53:00 there's a guy again I've no affiliation with this company,

1:53:03 but I was recommended this app called Flight Kit, f l y k i t t.

1:53:09 I used to struggle badly with jet lag.

1:53:11 This thing has pretty much eliminated it for me.

1:53:13 It is phenomenal.

1:53:14 The guy who created it has worked with Navy SEALs for years and he said yes,

1:53:19 circadian biology is part of it,

1:53:22 but flying particularly long flights is pro-inflammatory.

1:53:27 So there's a whole protocol around reducing inflammation through supplements,

1:53:32 through compression socks,

1:53:33 through meals at the right times, all all kind of stuff.

1:53:36 But that opened my mind to thinking,

1:53:38 okay I struggled if if I ever went to America from here like to the West Coast,

1:53:43 8-hour time difference, oh man you know I would really

1:53:47 really struggle with the with the time difference.

1:53:50 The last couple of times I went and I followed the Flight

1:53:53 Kit protocol to the letter I was about 90% of the way there.

1:53:57 You know, I it was it was game changing.

1:54:00 And one of the things the founder told me when I contacted him and spoke

1:54:04 to him about this, he goes the other thing you want to think about again,

1:54:08 I don't really fly that much.

1:54:09 So for a regular flyer this might be more important.

1:54:11 He said you can look at the airplane.

1:54:14 And I can't remember the models, but you can just Google this.

1:54:17 But some of the newer models said they they put

1:54:20 their cabin pressure to the equivalent of 4 to 6,000 feet.

1:54:23 Whereas the older planes it's more 6 to 8,000 feet.

1:54:28 And I'm like, oh wow.

1:54:30 So I've actually started for this trip I've got in a couple

1:54:32 of weeks I I don't know how I'm flying for ages.

1:54:35 I'm I'm actually looking at oh, I can go in the morning or go in the afternoon.

1:54:41 Oh, [clears throat] the afternoon flight is on a newer

1:54:43 plane where they're only pressuring to 4 5,000 feet.

1:54:47 And again, to some people this is going to be obsessive,

1:54:50 but I'm thinking well, you know, if I'm going to be on a plane for 12 hours

1:54:53 to LA [snorts] actually I'm sure it'll make a massive difference.

1:54:56 So I'd be interested James as part of your research you know,

1:55:00 maybe it's too complex, but it would be interesting to see if you notice

1:55:03 a difference on the newer planes versus the older planes.

1:55:06 I've been on every single sort of plane.

1:55:09 I am constantly traveling.

1:55:11 You know, maybe some years it'd be 100 days a year.

1:55:14 Like I'm on the road all the time.

1:55:16 And what I've seen is it is consistently bad.

1:55:20 Some are much worse than others, but it's consistently bad.

1:55:24 And what we hope to do with this information isn't to shame people,

1:55:28 isn't to point fingers, it's to say we're watching you and if you

1:55:33 improve your air quality we'll also announce that too.

1:55:37 And if we announce that more people are going to know about

1:55:39 this, more people are going to take your flight over the competing flight.

1:55:44 I think if if airlines start to have more oxygen in the cabin,

1:55:49 to start treating the air a little better it's

1:55:52 going to make a massive difference to how you feel

1:55:55 when when you show up at that destination and will

1:55:58 make you want to choose that airline more consistently.

1:56:03 As someone who probably doesn't want this label,

1:56:06 but is considered around the world now an expert in breathing

1:56:11 and the breath I'm interested that you travel so much

1:56:16 and I'm really interested as to are there some things now

1:56:19 that you never travel without based upon what you've learned and experienced?

1:56:24 Through trial and error I've become one of those weirdos

1:56:29 that has my little I'm sorry, it's true.

1:56:32 I never thought this would happen.

1:56:34 I would mock these people endlessly and now I'm one of them.

1:56:39 So I have specific lights that I travel with right when I get into the hotel

1:56:44 room I switch off the bulbs and I have red lights or amber lights.

1:56:49 So that's the number one thing.

1:56:51 I travel either with a neti pot if I know I'm

1:56:55 going to have a source of distilled water or with nasal spray,

1:56:58 natural nasal sprays.

1:57:00 Is that in case you get sick on the road?

1:57:02 No, it's preventative maintenance.

1:57:04 So you think about you're in an airplane.

1:57:07 We know the air quality is not very good.

1:57:09 People say, oh I only fly business or first class

1:57:11 because the air quality is so much better up there.

1:57:13 I'm here.

1:57:14 I have proof.

1:57:15 It is the exact same.

1:57:16 So you can use another excuse to do that and that's fine,

1:57:20 but don't don't say it's air quality.

1:57:22 So if you use a nasal spray,

1:57:24 you think of all the stuff you're exposed to on the airplane.

1:57:28 I can't get sick when I'm on the road.

1:57:29 I'm speaking at events.

1:57:31 I'm doing research.

1:57:32 If I get sick, it's a disaster.

1:57:34 So I spray out my nose.

1:57:36 I I spray When when you land or when you get on the plane?

1:57:40 I I do it when I land.

1:57:41 Sometimes if it's a long flight, 14-hour flight,

1:57:44 I will go in the bathroom half halfway through, spray it out a little bit.

1:57:48 I also have another spray bottle with a diluted version of of iodine in there.

1:57:54 If I feel a cold coming on, then

1:57:57 there's there's been some good research into that.

1:57:59 That was especially effective for COVID.

1:58:01 They they found this is very very effective.

1:58:04 Mouth tape on the plane?

1:58:05 Never.

1:58:06 I've seen people do it and I, you know Do you travel with mouth tape?

1:58:10 I use it every single night wherever I am.

1:58:12 See, okay, so you travel with it, you use it in the hotel,

1:58:15 but why do you not use it on the plane?

1:58:17 I just can't go that far.

1:58:19 Okay, I'd love to give you another reason that's

1:58:22 that's that's scientific but I just I just can't.

1:58:27 And I've noticed I have noticed cuz I paid attention to this.

1:58:32 If I'm sleeping like this up in a chair I tend to have my mouth closed.

1:58:37 It's when I put my head on a pillow.

1:58:40 Wow.

1:58:41 That I'll do that.

1:58:42 But I've seen an increasing number of people rocking

1:58:45 the mouth with their little hoodie and the eye thing.

1:58:47 You know, and that's that's great.

1:58:49 That's good for them.

1:58:50 people mouth tape on a plane before?

1:58:53 Yeah.

1:58:54 Yeah.

1:58:54 Yeah.

1:58:54 Oh yeah.

1:58:55 Yeah, for for sure.

1:58:56 you.

1:58:56 They're like, he's stuck on it.

1:58:57 No, no.

1:58:58 Nobody knows it's me.

1:58:59 Nobody nobody cares about me.

1:59:01 sign like, you got me into this?

1:59:03 No, everyone's jet lagged, you know, everyone's tired.

1:59:05 You just go on get get the stuff done.

1:59:07 So, I think lights, a nasal spray,

1:59:11 those breathing techniques you have in your back

1:59:13 pocket when you're waiting in line at immigration,

1:59:15 it's taking forever, and you're tired,

1:59:18 and you sense your nervous system getting stressed out.

1:59:22 Let's breathe into a count of round five or six.

1:59:24 Let's breathe out.

1:59:25 Let's do some humming.

1:59:26 As I'm When I'm at airports, if I'm early,

1:59:29 I'm walking, and I just make this a habit.

1:59:32 Even if that means an hour and a half, I'm walking.

1:59:34 And if I'm walking, I'm for four steps in, four steps out.

1:59:40 That's how I'm walking when I am breathing and walking and humming.

1:59:46 And I'm just as I'm talking about this, I'm

1:59:48 just realizing what an absolute freak I have become.

1:59:53 [snorts] But it's kept me healthy.

1:59:54 It's kept you healthy.

1:59:54 You look You look well.

1:59:55 You travel so much.

1:59:57 You You get sick very rarely.

1:59:59 I don't think, you know, it's easy to judge people, right?

2:00:02 And go, "Oh, they're doing this." Or they're doing that.

2:00:03 But everyone's got their own reasons, haven't they?

2:00:05 And you've obviously found over the years that actually I'm

2:00:09 sure I'm sure writing breath has also massively influenced you.

2:00:12 But you've probably just discovered that when you do it this way,

2:00:15 you're well, and you perform better.

2:00:17 And that's your job.

2:00:18 That's what you get paid to do.

2:00:19 That's That's the reality.

2:00:20 When I didn't do it this way, I was exhausted.

2:00:24 I was getting sick before I would have to do

2:00:27 a big I was getting congested all the time.

2:00:30 And I really felt the pain of travel.

2:00:32 I still feel the pain, but it's less so.

2:00:35 And all these things all together, you know,

2:00:38 it just they just fit into a small little bag.

2:00:41 It's not like I carry an extra suitcase filled with this stuff.

2:00:45 It's just small little stuff.

2:00:47 And I I can make my cozy little home in these hotel rooms,

2:00:51 and I'm fine with that.

2:00:54 One thing we've not mentioned I just want to quickly touch on, James,

2:00:57 is this correlation between lung size and longevity.

2:01:03 I think people who listen to my show and have them for a a number

2:01:05 of years will be very familiar with the idea that as you get older,

2:01:10 you lose muscle mass.

2:01:13 And really as you get older,

2:01:14 you want to make sure that you're doing something about it.

2:01:17 You know, resistance training or whatever else it is you might do.

2:01:21 You want to try and minimize how much you lose to be well as you get older.

2:01:27 Lung size seems to follow a similar trajectory

2:01:30 in the sense that as you get older,

2:01:31 I think in your book you write that between the ages of 30 and 50,

2:01:34 you lose 12% of your lung capacity.

2:01:37 And at 80 years old,

2:01:39 30% less air is coming in than it was I think when you were younger.

2:01:44 That's right.

2:01:45 Right?

2:01:45 So, just give us a quick overview of lung size and longevity, if you will.

2:01:49 So, if you have a smaller gas tank, you have to fill up more often, right?

2:01:54 We know that.

2:01:55 And every time you fill up, that's going to require you to exert more energy.

2:02:00 You know, you have to stop, you have to fill up.

2:02:02 So, why would you want to do that?

2:02:05 What you What you want to do is have a larger gas tank,

2:02:08 so you don't have to fill up that that often.

2:02:10 You can conserve that energy,

2:02:12 and your body can use that energy to help restore itself.

2:02:16 We know this is absolutely true with athletic performance,

2:02:19 but it's also true just in life.

2:02:22 Taking fewer deeper breaths is deeply restorative to the body.

2:02:28 So, at a time when we need as much energy as possible when we are growing older,

2:02:34 why would we want to take away our ability to breathe these slower,

2:02:40 deeper breaths that allow us to reserve more

2:02:42 energy to repair our aging and ailing bodies?

2:02:47 But the opposite happens, right?

2:02:49 Our lungs start shrinking up.

2:02:50 We lose flexibility in the musculature around here.

2:02:54 That's why you see a lot of older people that are hunched over like this.

2:02:58 If you are hunched over and your shoulders

2:03:00 are like this, you can only breathe Yeah.

2:03:02 up into the chest.

2:03:03 You see this all the time.

2:03:04 And they're breathing through the mouth.

2:03:05 Just [panting] So, yoga was based on this premise.

2:03:10 Early yoga was done seated.

2:03:12 So, it was done sitting down and breathing and stretching, right?

2:03:17 And chi gong.

2:03:18 What is chi gong?

2:03:21 It's learning how to take chi from the air,

2:03:24 expanding the lungs, and keeping that flexibility.

2:03:28 And the good news is that you can change this at any time.

2:03:32 You know, just like muscle mass.

2:03:34 Muscle mass actually takes a lot more effort

2:03:36 and dedication to maintain and increase when you get older.

2:03:40 But expanding your lungs and keeping flexibility here,

2:03:44 this is relatively easy compared to that.

2:03:46 And it will make a huge difference.

2:03:49 Because again, taking fewer, deeper,

2:03:51 softer breaths allows you more energy and less effort,

2:03:56 less wear and tear on the body.

2:03:58 I think I've heard you say, James, or maybe you wrote about it that lung size

2:04:04 is maybe the metric that's correlated the most with longevity.

2:04:09 Is it more than VO2 max and muscle mass?

2:04:11 That's when this study was released in the '80s,

2:04:14 the Framingham data, which was a 70-year longitudinal study.

2:04:19 They found the number one most significant marker

2:04:22 of lifespan was lung size and lung function.

2:04:26 What that means is the quicker your lungs shrink,

2:04:30 the quicker they become diseased, the sooner you are going to die.

2:04:35 It makes me wonder, is one of the reasons why movement and exercise

2:04:40 is so good for our longevity is because generally when you're moving,

2:04:43 and of course it depends whether you're walking or running or the intensity,

2:04:47 but you know, you are sort of working out your lungs, aren't you?

2:04:52 They're getting moved and worked out.

2:04:56 Whereas if you're just sat watching television hunched over on the sofa,

2:05:00 those lungs are not really doing much.

2:05:03 100%.

2:05:03 be at least one of the factors.

2:05:05 It's one of the Exercise has so many benefits for the brain,

2:05:08 for muscle mass, for the body.

2:05:09 Of course it does.

2:05:11 But that one part of of lung capacity doesn't seem to be mentioned too much.

2:05:17 Not not mentioned as much as it as it should.

2:05:19 But just maintaining moderate exercise regimens allows you to increase,

2:05:26 if you especially if smaller lungs, about 15% more lung capacity.

2:05:31 James, on my Instagram, when I mentioned yesterday that you were coming

2:05:35 on, there was quite a lot of excitement.

2:05:37 And a few questions have come in.

2:05:39 So, I So, new thing I'm trying is

2:05:41 to see these sort of quick-fire questions at the end.

2:05:44 You Are you good if I just go through a few of them?

2:05:46 Let's do it.

2:05:46 The first few are around children, okay?

2:05:49 Alex Miller says, "How can we encourage our children

2:05:51 to have good breathing habits?" Children don't care about being healthy.

2:05:57 [gasps] What they do care about is how they look.

2:05:58 So, I've spoken at a lot of different schools,

2:06:02 and I tell them about the benefits of nasal breathing,

2:06:04 and they're, you know, rolling their eyes, whatever.

2:06:06 And then you show them a picture

2:06:08 of their face if they are chronic mouth breather,

2:06:11 and how it's going to change their profile to have this retrognathic profile

2:06:15 and crooked teeth and all that, and it scares the hell out of them.

2:06:18 So, I would suggest if you have teenagers, don't start with a health angle.

2:06:23 Find a picture of a kid with adenoid face.

2:06:27 That's That's the official term.

2:06:29 Or retrognathic facial growth.

2:06:32 And show that to your kids, and they're going to say,

2:06:35 "Oh my god, I want my face to grow differently than that.

2:06:39 I'm going to shut my mouth and become

2:06:41 an obligate nasal breather." Okay, love it.

2:06:44 Ali says, "Why do you think, James,

2:06:45 that we're not taught about breath in school so

2:06:48 we can appreciate it from a much earlier age?"

2:06:51 Why aren't we taught about nutrition in schools or exercise in schools?

2:06:55 Hopefully that will change,

2:06:56 but don't rely on these institutions or governments to do it.

2:07:00 This is why shows like this are so important.

2:07:02 Now you have the information.

2:07:04 You can take this and develop your own program for yourself and your kids.

2:07:09 Another Ali says, "What's the one way

2:07:11 of breathing you'd recommend to teenagers with anxiety?" Mhm.

2:07:16 The Unfortunately, this is going to be a longer

2:07:19 answer than than you would hope it would be.

2:07:22 The number one thing I would highly suggest you do is have your kid,

2:07:27 if they suffer from anxiety,

2:07:28 especially if they suffer from symptoms of ADHD, to look at their sleep.

2:07:34 There is more and more data coming out showing that the likely cause,

2:07:40 not the effect, because of many cases

2:07:43 of ADHD are directly tied to sleep disordered breathing.

2:07:48 A kid is choking on themselves.

2:07:50 A kid is snoring all night long.

2:07:53 They wake up tired.

2:07:54 They can't focus.

2:07:55 They get cranky.

2:07:57 It stunts their growth.

2:07:58 They get sick all the time.

2:08:00 So, something like around 70 to 80%

2:08:03 of kids with ADHD have sleep disordered breathing.

2:08:06 Start with the breath.

2:08:09 As I mentioned, get that phone, record your kid at night.

2:08:13 If they are snoring or have sleep apnea, you have to fix that first.

2:08:17 Then I can introduce a bunch of different

2:08:19 breathing techniques that can bring the anxiety down.

2:08:22 But start with the foundation.

2:08:23 Yeah, I love that, James.

2:08:24 And I I just want to highlight something you said there.

2:08:26 You said in many cases of ADHD, right?

2:08:29 Because I know this is such a controversial area.

2:08:32 You're not saying all cases.

2:08:33 Absolutely not.

2:08:34 It could be a contributory factor at the very least.

2:08:37 So, let's look at it.

2:08:39 But But you're going beyond that.

2:08:40 You're saying for some people it's actually causing it.

2:08:42 I But I will say, given that you're 100% right about that.

2:08:46 Given that, you can do all these other therapies.

2:08:50 If your kid is snoring or suffering from sleep apnea,

2:08:55 any sleep disordered breathing,

2:08:56 just having breathing, it doesn't matter what other therapies you do.

2:09:00 You have to fix that first.

2:09:02 Yeah, it also reminds me of something about a year ago, well not quite a year.

2:09:05 Dr.

2:09:06 Bryce Applebaum said to me, he's a he's a phenomenal functional optometrist.

2:09:11 And I I went and done his five-day intensive course in in uh near Baltimore,

2:09:15 and it's phenomenal.

2:09:16 And he says, you know, let's say ADHD for example,

2:09:20 and I again I don't want to misspeak for Bryce,

2:09:22 but he says some version of until we've ruled out functional vision problems,

2:09:31 I don't think a diagnosis of ADHD can be made.

2:09:34 I.e.

2:09:35 What the principle being that is a collection of symptoms that we give a label,

2:09:41 and what he's saying and what you're saying is, look,

2:09:44 there may be reasons for that that can be changed.

2:09:47 He would argue that if you've got a functional vision problem,

2:09:51 and you can work on that and get it better,

2:09:53 and the brain's working better, some of those symptoms will go.

2:09:57 Mhm.

2:09:58 You're saying that it may be that your child has got a sleep disorder breathing.

2:10:03 Well, what happens if you correct that?

2:10:05 Maybe it'll get better.

2:10:07 Maybe it'll get fully better.

2:10:08 Maybe there'll be no symptoms.

2:10:09 Maybe there'll be less symptoms.

2:10:11 It's it's just trying to look at these things

2:10:13 in a slightly different way without getting triggered,

2:10:15 just going, well, maybe there's something I can do that might help.

2:10:18 I heard this, this is so creepy.

2:10:19 I heard this exact same thing 2 weeks ago when I was talking to an optometrist.

2:10:23 He said, look at the amount of kids who have learning disabilities,

2:10:27 and then look at the amount of kids who have vision problems,

2:10:31 and those two diagrams almost completely overlap.

2:10:36 And his thinking was, you have to first restore the vision problem,

2:10:41 and then you can address these other things.

2:10:43 And he has hundreds and hundreds of case studies showing

2:10:47 that when these kids were able to have improved vision,

2:10:51 the majority of their learning problems went away.

2:10:53 Yeah, same with Bryce, he's got those.

2:10:55 And again, vision is not the same as eyesight,

2:10:58 and if you want to go deeper on that, you know,

2:11:01 check out my my podcast with Bryce where we go into all those differences.

2:11:05 Okay, um Jana said, what would be the one

2:11:09 ultimate breathing exercise that one should do every day?

2:11:14 I you know, a lot of people ask me this, they they think that I'm

2:11:17 going to whisper to them some mystical

2:11:19 knowledge that I learned in some cave somewhere,

2:11:22 but um the exercise is breathe through your nose.

2:11:25 Yeah.

2:11:26 That's it.

2:11:26 That's all.

2:11:27 It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.

2:11:30 And I I'll finish up with this one from Jules.

2:11:33 She says, what is your own go-to breathing technique,

2:11:37 James, for in-the-moment stress?

2:11:40 In-the-moment stress, this is what I do.

2:11:44 I relax my shoulders.

2:11:45 I relax my tongue.

2:11:47 I take an inhale.

2:11:49 Hold my breath.

2:11:50 I take an inhale.

2:11:51 Hold my breath.

2:11:52 Take another inhale all the way up.

2:11:55 Let it calmly out very slowly.

2:11:59 And then I do it again.

2:12:00 I take an inhale.

2:12:01 Hold.

2:12:02 Inhale.

2:12:03 Hold.

2:12:04 Inhale.

2:12:06 And we're going to do it one more time, letting it out completely.

2:12:11 We're going to inhale in.

2:12:13 Hold.

2:12:14 Inhale.

2:12:15 Hold.

2:12:16 Inhale all the way up.

2:12:18 Let it out very calmly.

2:12:22 That tends to reset me.

2:12:24 Yeah.

2:12:25 Love it.

2:12:26 This is not a question, it's just a comment from Jackie who said, "Rangan,

2:12:30 please tell James that his book was life-changing for her." I know

2:12:34 you hear that all the time from people all over the world.

2:12:38 James, honestly, I I as I said at the start,

2:12:42 having you on for the third time was fantastic, yes,

2:12:47 cuz I've enjoyed this conversation,

2:12:49 but over the last few days it's given me another reason to dip back into breath.

2:12:53 Obviously, it's out now, and I say obviously, people may not know,

2:12:55 there's a newer version of it, the paperback with some,

2:12:58 you know, a new introduction, some new sections.

2:13:01 It really is a phenomenal book.

2:13:03 I can see why it's had such an amazing impact all over the world.

2:13:10 To finish off, I'm just really interested,

2:13:15 the book's almost been out for 6 years.

2:13:19 Why is it do you think that 6 years on from releasing this book,

2:13:25 people are still wanting to talk to you about the topic of breath?

2:13:32 I think that even though I am working on other projects,

2:13:36 I've been working on a new book,

2:13:37 which is coming out next year, I keep getting pulled back into breathing,

2:13:44 and I think it has to do with a level of anger that parents have,

2:13:51 that other people have, that they had to learn about all

2:13:55 of these fundamental abilities that we should be doing,

2:13:59 that are available for us for free, that anyone can do.

2:14:04 They had to learn about it from a journalist in a book,

2:14:09 and not from their doctors, which they've been seeing for decades.

2:14:14 And so the reason why I still enjoy doing

2:14:17 these conversations is because these people are still angry.

2:14:23 And I want to make them less angry by giving them information.

2:14:28 And they can take that information and choose

2:14:32 to do with whatever they want with it,

2:14:34 but I've found that that's become a side role for me

2:14:39 is trying to disseminate information to allow people to empower themselves.

2:14:46 Yeah.

2:14:47 Well, James, I think you've done incredible work.

2:14:49 Thank you for releasing the new edition.

2:14:52 Thank you for continuously doing these interviews,

2:14:55 because with every single interview you do,

2:14:57 there is a at least going to be one person who hears it who goes,

2:15:02 "Oh my god, that might be why my child is, you know, ABC.

2:15:08 That might be why I struggle with my energy."

2:15:11 Whatever it might be, that may be why,

2:15:13 even though my diet and my exercise is dialed in, maybe

2:15:19 the reason I'm exhausted all the time cuz I'm not breathing properly.

2:15:23 So, I want to thank you.

2:15:24 I think it's a gift to the world, this book.

2:15:26 I've enjoyed getting to know you over the past years,

2:15:29 and thanks for coming to the studio.

2:15:30 I really appreciate it.

2:15:31 Thanks very much for having me.

2:15:33 If you enjoyed that conversation,

2:15:34 then I think you are really going to enjoy this one.

2:15:37 How is our physiology designed?

2:15:39 You know, essentially you and I are cavemen.

2:15:41 The modern diet is so recent in terms of evolution.

2:15:45 It's so just seconds, as it were.

2:15:48 I I don't think we're very well adapted [music] to the diet we're eating.