The New Science Of Breath: James Nestor On Why Most People Are Breathing Wrong

We're breathing all day long. Most of us, the vast majority of us, are doing it in a dysfunctional way. New York Times best-selling author James Nestor is changing the way we breathe. The definitive expert on breathing. James Nestor examines how breathing techniques improve your health. How you're getting the majority of your energy is not through food and drink. It's through your breathing. It's a chronic problem. and people don't realize that it's one of the main reasons they're so sick and they're not getting better around 70 to 80 percent of kids with adhd suffer from sleep disorder breathing you want to be in a balanced state where your body can naturally do what it's supposed to be doing these breathwork practices are so incredibly powerful and it's extremely simple this is why people think it's not going to work. James, it's an absolute delight to have you here. Long overdue. I'm so excited to talk to you. You have become quite the definitive expert on breathing, whether you like it or not. What are we doing wrong? We're all walking around mouth breathers. On some level, it's sort of like, well, if that's our default, is it really so bad? Like, why should we, you know, listen to what you have to say? Is there really anything fundamentally wrong? What are the dangers of breathing the way that we always have? Like, you know, for the most part, for the better part of my life, I never thought twice about how I was breathing. So what is going on? Well, our default as a culture, at least in the States, is to eat a bunch of ultra-processed crap food. But that doesn't mean it's good, right? How many people eat McDonald's? You know, how many people are eating a bunch of cookies every day? but that will allow you to stay alive but it won't allow you to stay healthy and the same thing is true about our breathing we're breathing all day long most of us the vast majority of us are doing it in a dysfunctional way and when i mentioned that this really puts up people's hackles they said what are you talking about the vast majority 90 of us but if you look at the people in your family your friend circle and people you work with how many people have asthma how many people have anxiety, how many people snore, how many people mouth breathe, how many people have COPD. And you realize that the vast majority of modern humans have these issues. So there's a bunch of things that created these issues, and they almost all have to do with industrialization, almost all of them. Elaborate on that. Okay. So the first one is the structural problem. Our mouths are too small. and because our mouths are too small, we have trouble getting air in and out of our bodies. And a lot of people say, well, what do you mean my mouth is too small? Here it is now. But if you look at ancient schools, so if you go back in time from about 400 years any time earlier, and you look at their teeth, they all have perfectly straight teeth. So all of our ancestors had straight teeth, and they had straight teeth because their mouths were wide enough to accommodate their teeth when they came in. If you look at us today, around 90% of us have something called malocclusion, some sort of deformation. Mals aren't optimized. They're so small and they've grown in certain ways that when our teeth grow in, they grow in crooked. They fight for room. So I think everyone can agree with that, right? How many people do you know have had braces? I had a childhood That was a childhood of trauma because of my headgear orthodontia and terrible periodontal disease and extractions. But the kind of operating idea here is that we need to remove these teeth because they're crowded. You know, it's like instead of expanding your jaw because these teeth, you know, there was obviously some evolutionary reason why we have all these teeth. And, you know, presumptively, like, there was space for them. There no longer is. So instead of widening the jaw, we just remove the teeth so there's more space for some of them. What could go wrong, right? I can tell you what will go wrong when you start removing teeth. And you take a face that's quickly developing of a kid who's 12 or 13 years old, and you crane it back. So it's almost like foot binding, right? But you're doing this to your mouth. You're craning it back. The rest of the face and head is growing, but you're keeping this mouth small. And it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And eventually, that upper palate starts growing up into your sinuses. The V-shaped palate, your mouth is so small that every time you take a breath, there isn't enough room for that air to flow down easily. So it's a simple physics equation that you have to look at here. It's like plumbing. Think of your airway as a plumbing fixture. What happens when the plumbing fixture is not wide enough to accommodate the water flow? It gets clogged up, and that's why so many of us are suffering from snoring and even sleep apnea. What is the relationship between that and mouth breathing? Because to me, it sounds as if our jaws are collapsing and our mouths are getting smaller, wouldn't that lead us to be breathing through our nose more? What happens is, I'm a great example of this because I've had all the things that you have had, headgear, extraction, but everything else is screwed up. At least I have straight teeth. But this upper palate starts growing up, and it takes away real estate from the sinuses, right? And after that starts happening, we have more trouble breathing in and out of our noses, so we default to mouth breathing. It's just easier this way. We have a mouth. We can breathe through it. That's fine, but we are not designed to be breathing through it. This is a backup system. If anything happens to the nose, we can always breathe through our mouth. That doesn't mean it's normal or it's good for us. You mentioned ultra-processed foods. What's the relationship between our dysfunctional relationship with breathing and the industrialization of our food complex? Well, this is the first question I had to answer, right? I'm like, okay, my mouth is small. Modern mouths are small. Ancient skulls had huge mouths. They just unearthed some human species from 700,000 years ago. Look at its jaw. Perfectly straight teeth. So we know that is a fact. It's provable. Anyone can see this. What caused it? Why would a species suddenly grow a small mouth? It's not an evolutionary advantage to have a small mouth. You can trace the exact point at which this happened, and a researcher in the 1930s did that. He spent 10 years traveling around the world. The moment industrialized food comes into a culture, 50% of the next generation will have a small mouth and crooked teeth. Whoa. Five, zero percent. The next generation, 70%. Across cultures, across the globe? Yes. It does not matter if you grew up in Asia, if you grew up in England, if you grew up in Africa. It's the same for everybody. And this is verified by archaeology? This is verified. Robert Corcini has 250 scientific papers on this. He's still alive today, and he's been talking about this since the 70s and 80s, right? So this has been verified over and over and over again. So if you go back to the 30s, you go back to the 20s, and you start looking at the percentage of the population that has crooked teeth, and here we are today, right? You know, about three generations in from that. And 90% of us have crooked teeth. 90% of us have a mouth that is too small for our face. And again, like back to the food piece, what about the changes in the things that we were eating have contributed to this? it's how soft the food is. So that's the number one thing. So vitamins, minerals play a smaller role, but it's the consistency of the food. If you look at the food that our great, great, great, great, great grandparents were eating, it required chewing. Our ancestors were chewing for around two to three hours a day, chewing all the time. When you chew, you develop the skelicature and the musculature. the mouth widens, right? So it has this input, this exercise. If you look at industrialized food, think about the food in England in the 1800s, right? You have baked goods, you have canned goods, you have pickled stuff. Everything is soft. It doesn't require any chewing. And think about the food that you're eating today. Probably not. You're probably eating salads, other things that require some chewing. Yeah, but I'm not masticating two or three hours a day. No, nobody is, right? And that's the main thing. And most of this happens, not all of it, but most of it happens when we are very young, right? What you are weaned on to. Are you weaned on to applesauce and boiled carrots? Are you weaned on to food that requires you to chew? So those early ages, you know, from the ages of one through four to five are, in my opinion, the most essential to developing that proper foundation to have a wide enough mouth to accommodate your teeth. Yeah, conventional wisdom is that we need soft foods for young people, babies, etc., because they don't have teeth yet or their teeth are just coming in. And so this is the most effective way to nourish them. But essentially what you're saying is this is when they need to be learning how to chew and exercising those jaw muscles because those are the years in which the jaw is being formed. So that is what we have been taught, that babies should only be eating soft food. If that were true, then we wouldn't be here today, right? None of our ancestors would have lived. So baby-led weaning is this big movement happening right now to teach kids going from breastfeeding to eating real food. So you have to be careful, but you look at any other culture and you look at all of our ancestors and how they raised their kids, and that's how they did it. and it seemed to work just fine. I'm not going to say everyone should immediately feed their infant hard foods. Okay, I would never, ever say that. Of course, be responsible. Use your own judgment here, but check out baby-led weaning. To go from breastfeeding to actually chewing, masticating foods has huge benefits to your facial structure and your airway health. So as a result of these factors that you've just described, Our mouths are smaller. Our jaws are compressed. This is impinging upon our sinuses and our ability to breathe through our nose. So we are breathing through our mouths increasingly over time as a consequence of this, but not effectively. Our breath is not deep. It's short. Talk a little bit about the depth of breath and what that is doing to us physiologically. So the next question is exactly that. It's like, so we're breathing through our mouth. We know that. Why is it so bad? Like, what is the difference? Yeah, this is what, yeah. So this is the real net of the bank. We're walking around, you know. You're surviving just like you could survive eating, you know, Dunkin' Donuts all day long. You survive. It doesn't mean you're healthy. So the first one, I learned this from a lot of dentists. who knew that dentists were so into airway health, but that's their jam lately, is when you're constantly breathing through your mouth, you're making for a more acidic environment in your mouth, which makes for considerably more cavities. So I found research dating back 120, 130 years of dentists saying the number one cause of cavities isn't sugar. It's mouth breathing. It's chronic mouth breathing. And I know many dentists who say the same thing today. So that's right at the beginning, right? But as you follow that breath in, if you're breathing through your mouth, you're taking a more shallow breath. You tend to be breathing into your chest because it's a very quick breath, right? In order for that air to have any function, any purpose, it needs to get down into our lungs where it can be extracted into our bloodstream. But when we are breathing through our mouths, so much of it gets caught in our mouth, gets caught in our throat, gets caught in the bronchi. it doesn't make it to the lungs. So you were just using energy to bring breath in and to exhale it without any purpose, right? So you're just wasting energy. You were just spinning your wheels. You get a little bit of oxygen from that, but then that causes you to breathe more and to breathe heavier and faster. And the faster and more shallow you breathe, all those messages from Your lungs go to your brain to tell you it's an emergency, that you need to panic. And people do this all day long. They stay in this cycle of stress. So it perpetuates a constant sympathetic nervous system agitation. You said it much more succinctly than I did. That's interesting. There's the nervous system reaction to this modality of breath. but what is happening in terms of the balance of oxygen and CO2? What is that all about? Obviously, we all know we're breathing in oxygen. We have to use our diaphragm to pull air into our lungs so that the oxygen can get transferred into our circulatory system where it binds with hemoglobin and our blood carries it to our tissues and delivers it so that it can be put to use. Right. So that's the part, as you mentioned, that most people acknowledge and know. But the other part of this is the nervous system part. And another additional part of that is the CO2 part. So when you're over-breathing, you're going to get lightheaded, right? You might feel some tingling in your fingers and your toes. You might feel a little cold. So that's not from an increase of oxygen in your bloodstream. It's from a decrease of CO2. So you're off-gassing too much CO2 when you're over-breathing, and that causes this vasoconstriction in your blood vessels. So it's actually harder to get oxygen to your hungry cells when you are over-breathing because you're offloading too much CO2. You need CO2 to deliver oxygen into the cell. You call CO2 the divorce lawyer. We always think of CO2 as the bad guy. Oxygen good, CO2 bad. It's this waste product, but it actually performs several essential metabolic functions, one of which is it's necessary in order for the oxygen to detach from the hemoglobin so that it can be delivered to the tissues. And if you don't have an adequate amount of CO2 in your system, it will continue to remain bound to the hemoglobin. So it's not being delivered where it's intended to go. That's right. So your bloodstaffs could be good. They could be in 98, you know, 97, because you're getting a bunch of oxygen into your bloodstream, but oxygen in your bloodstream doesn't do anything. That oxygen needs to go somewhere, and that's what CO2 is all about. So this perpetual vicious cycle of over-breathing is not only inefficient, but it's denying you of easy access to oxygen to fuel your cells. When we breathe through our mouth and we're breathing shallow, what is the CO2 implication of that or the kind of oxygen delivery system impairment as a result of that? CO2 levels drop. You become more alkaline. That's what it is. So you're constantly, it's being out of balance. Your body knows how to compensate for it, right? and it will compensate for a long time, but that also causes other damage. You don't want to be in a state where your body is always compensating. You want to be in a balanced state where your body can naturally do what it's supposed to be doing. And over-breathing and even chronically under-breathing can both put your body into the state of chronic low-grade stress. So you're perpetually stressed and you're not getting enough oxygen into your system is essentially what you're saying. You're getting enough oxygen. Not to the tissues. It's just taking so much more time. It's taking so much more effort. You will be able to stay alive breathing this way. People do this for decades. But it is not an efficient way of breathing, and eventually your body is going to break down. And what is it about breathing through the nose that changes this? Well, try it right now. Take a breath through the nose. Huge breath. I'm taking a very intentional deep breath. Okay. But you do that unconsciously once you've trained yourself to breathe properly. So if you take a very rich deep breath through the nose and exhale, the total amount of time that took was three seconds, four seconds. Now do the same thing with your mouth. But I can take a deep breath through my mouth if I'm thinking about it. You can slow it down. Is that how you unconsciously breathe, though? No. But when I am stressed, I will unconsciously take a deep breath through my nose. It's sort of a genetic predisposition to calm the system. Anything you want to do consciously breathing is great. This is why people consciously over-breathe. They consciously under-breathe. They consciously hold their breath. The foundation of healthy breathing is what you're doing unconsciously. So very few people, I don't think I've ever seen one, are breathing like that. How their mouth breathing is. And once you see this, you start seeing it everywhere. On every flight you're on, the person sitting next to you on the subway, all over the place. Because it's a chronic problem. And people don't realize that it's one of the main reasons they're so sick and they're not getting better. What is the impact of our sedentary lifestyle on this default mode of breathing? Like our posture is terrible. We're hunched over. So, you know, our chest is sort of, you know, sort of caved in. And we're not sitting in a way where we're open. And even if we are breathing through our nose, if we're hunched over and, you know, kind of weak in our core, even if you're practicing proper breathing technique through the nose, it's still less than optimal, I would imagine. It's awful. I mean, you can look at how many diseases, how many chronic conditions are tied to the sedentary lifestyle, a lifestyle in which we spend 90% of our time indoors. Most of that time is hunched over a desk or slouched in a couch. So when you're sitting this way, It's so much harder to take that full, deep breath of air to get that diagram to descend in the way it's supposed to, right, to allow it to come back up. So many of these issues are tied to this lifestyle. That doesn't mean we can't change it. We can change it. You can breathe properly when you are sitting in certain positions. Of course you can. But you have to become aware of it. And once you become aware of it, you can build that unconscious habit. And that's what this is all about. It's not about trying to give people 10 more boxes to check every single day. So did you do this, this, this, this with your breathing? No one's going to do that. The deal is you want to train yourself in the right way to build a foundation so you never have to think about it again. So you are always defaulting to that balanced breathing mode. This episode is sponsored by Rivian. For me, historically, a car has always just been a way to get around. But I have to say, I am just in love with the R1S Rivian loan being. Because it's this incredible all-electric vehicle with insane tech that can take you just about anywhere. But mostly because it's so much more than a vehicle. It's like this passport for adventure, which got me thinking about my favorite road trips. I've done many over the years, and the best ones are never about the destination. They're about adventure. They're about possibility, which is basically the Rivian mission. There's storage everywhere, front trunk, gear tunnels for wet or sandy stuff, room for boards, bikes, packs, whatever your version of adventure looks like. You can literally plug things in and power your world, coffee, camp gear, even a full travel kitchen. You can even get a rooftop tent for your R1S. And yet, on the road, it's refined and quiet. But when the pavement ends, you switch into off-road and just keep going. The R1S SUV has three rows, seat seven, folds down into a perfect sleep setup. The R1T is a truck that can tow, it can haul, and still feel beautifully designed. Most vehicles make you choose between rugged and refined. Rivian gives you both so you can adventure without compromise. Most wearables tell you what happened. How good was your sleep? Where's your recovery at? Did you hit your steps? But they don't really tell you why, let alone what to really do about it. That is except for WHOOP, which gives you a complete picture of your health from how you sleep to how you recover to how you're aging. And now, and this is huge, the new WHOOP Advanced Labs brings together over 65 key biomarkers like cholesterol, vitamin D, and cortisol with more than 100,000 daily health data points from wearing the device. When you schedule a lab test, you're not getting a spreadsheet that you don't understand. You're getting clarity on what's really happening inside your body and concrete next steps to improve your health. Every test is reviewed by a clinician. And instead of just numbers, you get a personalized plan that connects the dots. Exactly which habits, from sleep patterns to specific supplements, are going to move your specific health markers. For one month free of Whoop, go to join.whoop.com slash roll. I would consider myself to be fairly connected to my body, you know, as an athlete and somebody who cares about these sorts of things. but the first time that these ideas were introduced to me and uh and i was told to take an inhale through my nose it was immediately obvious to the person that i was with that i was that i was you know breathing into my chest but not my belly and it's sort of like use your diaphragm and like breathe in the belly and i'm like i couldn't i'm like i don't know what you mean like i think the average person who's like you know you need to take these deeper breaths or whatever, the idea of like there's different ways of inhaling and more effective ways of doing that is, you know, you said training. I think that takes some training. And for someone who's much less kind of used to inhabiting their own body and knowing what certain things feel like and having some, you know, kind of agency over different muscles, like that's a, it's a more, it's a steeper hill to climb than I think you originally realized. When did you get that training, though? Oh, years ago in yoga. Okay. Yeah, in yoga class. So is this before you started doing ultramarathons, before you started doing these crazy feats? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was sort of steeped in the L.A. yoga community for a number of years and was introduced to these ideas back then before all of the ultra stuff. There's no way you could have done the ultra stuff without having your breathing locked in. It's absolutely impossible. But I'm an unrepentant mouth breather, James. I've tried the mouth tape at night, and every morning I wake up, and it doesn't stay. You know, like, it's off. So I struggle with this, admittedly. Like, this is something I've far from mastered. But if you think about the mechanics of you breathing, there's no way you could run for that long without breathing, without having this 95% locked in. Right. You could if you were 18 years old because the body is still very forgiving at that age. But as we get older, you need all of the energy you can possibly get. That's why breathing properly for runners and cyclists is so essential to what they're doing. Why would you want to be spending extra energy that you could use to run further and run faster? And that's what breathing properly allows you to do. Yeah, endurance is all about learning how to maximize oxygen uptake and utilization for maximum efficiency. So it is very much about long inhales and exhales and maintaining a pace in which you can continue to do that for a long period of time. I mean, look at Kampoji finishing the two-hour marathon. Look at how he's breathing. And this is available on YouTube. Look at where his shoulders are. Look at him breathing in and out of the nose. He's so chill. He's so relaxed. Everything is going very deep and very slow. This is a guy that's running at, what, 13 miles per hour, 14 hours, you know, after two hours. So there's no way he could be doing that without having proper breathing biomechanics. I want to get to the chronic illness piece. I want to understand the relationship between dysfunctional breathing and chronic disease. Obviously, breathing through the nose, like this is a line of first defense for your immune system. It's lined with all of these antimicrobial, antibacterial kind of elements that help prevent us from getting sick. So when we're breathing through our mouth, we're not taking advantage of this and we're inhaling pathogens, etc. This is a carbon dioxide monitor. For the last three years, me and a small army of weirdos have been going around every flight, every hotel, almost every restaurant, and measuring the CO2 in indoor environments. So what we found in schools, especially in schools, have terrible air quality because the HVAC systems aren't working very well. And in hotels, even the nicest hotels, have such bad air quality that around one in every 25 breaths you're taking in these hotels is someone else's exhalation. And if that exhalation is filled with viruses and bacteria and other gunk, that is going into your lungs. So this has become a huge problem. This is the new section of the book that I put in here that I didn't know about. And so many different industries are ignoring air quality. I'm not just saying this. I've never seen better air quality in a podcasting studio than right now. Oh, is that right? When I brought this out before, it's been at 2,000 parts per million. So you guys are doing whatever the hell you're doing. I don't know what you're doing. I think we have that air purifier over there, which we are circulating. Something's bringing fresh air. We are circulating. This is fresh air because the outdoor environment is around, what, 422 parts per million, right? It's going up. Parts per million of what? Of CO2. CO2. So the indoor environment, anything past north of 1500 has been shown to have serious cognitive effects, lower test scores, anxiety, higher blood pressure for some people. That's what a study at Harvard found, that 50% lower test scores north of 1500 parts per million. So many schools that have gotten these have seen 2,000, 2,500 all day long for eight hours a day. So you're asking a kid to come into a classroom and perform at their best, and they are constantly getting sidelined by their bodies that are placed in this stress response. What is a healthy range for an indoor space then? Indoor space is low as you can go. So if you're getting 500, that's great. I think anything up to 1,000 is very good. I have never seen something this low. The hotel I was in a few months ago, very fancy place. I won't name it, in L.A. You notice that hotels, you can't open the windows anymore. I know. So they just glued them all up. Why would they do that? I don't know. It drives me crazy. For your safety? No, because 50% of their energy cost is spent on heating and cooling. People leave the heat on and the window open and leave the room. That could be it. I think it has more to do with it is so much more economical to recycle air that's already been heated or cooled down because then you don't have to heat or cool down air from the outside. So they recycle the same stale air over and over and over again, which is one of the reasons why you wake up in the morning and you feel like crap, even though you weren't out drinking. Like, why do I have a headache? because they're recycling the same air. And now we know what they're doing because so many people are carrying these around. What is that called? It's called a CO2 monitor. People can just buy it on Amazon. There's a bunch of different ones that you can buy. Amazon has a variety. I've tried them all. This brand, these made by Aranet. I have nothing to do with Aranet. I'm not getting any money from this. These are the most accurate because we tested it against a very robust and accurate machine. And they're a bit clunkier, but I prefer accuracy. And on my flight out here, you know, it was 1,900 parts per million the whole way through. And you wonder why people go in and sit down. You're like, God, everyone's so chill, man. They're just all falling asleep. I suppose on some level, is this not improving your CO2 tolerance, though? This was a question I had, and I talked to a physiologist about this. I said, well, what's the difference? He said the difference is one is happening inside your body endogenously, and your body knows how to handle that. The other is an acute exterior stress on you, and it's sudden, right? You go from controlling the CO2, the pH in your body. So your blood pH always has to be in this range. Otherwise, nothing works. So your body will do whatever it can. It steals minerals from bones, right? to keep your blood pH in that range. But when you're suddenly exposed to an environment that is not the ecosystem that you created in your body, it creates all this stress and a bunch of bad things that can happen. On occasion, it's fine, right? Who cares if you're in a subway car and it's 5,000 parts per million? One in every 10 breaths is someone else's exhalation. That's fascinating. So if you are in a high parts per million environment and there's no reason to be stressed out and you're feeling stressed and anxiety, this is potentially a reason why. Potentially. Okay, so somebody who's listening or watching picks one of these up. They take it to their office where they're spending 8 to 10 hours a day, and they realize the levels are super high. They go to their kid's classroom. Levels are super high there. But the kid's got to go to that classroom every day, and you've got to go to that office every day. And if you go to your boss or the school superintendent and say, hey, look at this, chances are probably not going to result in any kind of meaningful solution. So where is the agency? Like, what are you supposed to do? You would be surprised. Especially, I've spoken at a lot of schools, and I do this little bit at these schools. And the first thing the parents do is they're sitting in the audience, and they look at the superintendent. and they shoot lasers and things change really fast. The reason is this is a fixable problem. We weren't having these problems before. Remember those things called windows in hotels? Even if you could open it this much, you just open it and it's fresh air. It's the same thing that was in schools. We started building these schools and offices that don't have windows, trusting that the HVAC systems, which were built for one quantity of people, Now twice the number of people are in there, and the system can't keep up. It's a fixable problem. Oh, it just went over. It went up to 1,000. Well, I think that proves. Did I just breathe on it? What happened? I think that it is collecting CO2 from this. So the school thing, especially if your kid is going to a private school, fixable problem, right? The office thing, if you go to your boss or the HR person and you say, I think here's the science. There are numerous studies. This is not sketchy hypotheses, right? This is real stuff. It's been measured time and time again in all these different countries. They say, here's the science. This is impacting our ability to perform at the peak potential that you require. All we're asking for is a breath of fresh air. I think they might tend to listen. When I book hotels now one of the things that I require almost all the time if I can find it is a window that opens And it makes such a difference especially for jet lag to wake up in the morning and see this at 500 instead of 4 You know, it makes a huge difference to whether or not I have a headache, whether or not I have energy. And I don't want to be too hypochondriac about this. You could get neurotic about it. I know, I'm leaning that way a little bit. But my friends are setting me straight. It's one thing, it's like up to 1,400 parts per month. you're probably, it's one in 50 breaths to someone else's exhalation. When you're on a flight and it's at 2,000 for 14 hours, it's going to affect how you feel. So we've recorded hundreds and hundreds of these measurements, and we're going to put them on a database that is available for anyone for free to be able to access, and you'll be able to upload your own measurements as well because people were asking me, they're like, cool this is very masturbatory you're just cruising around and shaming people oh good on you i said well i don't think governments are going to do too much about this but i think industries will once people start mentioning how bad the air quality is on some airlines and how good it is on other airlines so that shows it's a fixable this is a choice that they're choosing to make and i think that's how we're going to elicit some change here curiously uh correct me if i'm wrong like green buildings, like lead tested buildings, you would think like, oh, they're going to have the pure air, but they're the buildings that are recycling the air for conservation reasons, right? And so the CO2 is going to be, you could predict higher in those environments. Is that right? 100% right. That is what I've found. I'm not saying every lead certified green building has that, but that is what I've found in offices. It's especially what I've found in these hotels, these wellness hotels. I'm sure you stay in them. I stay in them too. I get set up in these and I stay in and they look great and they're filled with tan and pretty people and everything there is lush and it's wellness and it's organic and the air quality in these places is atrocious and you can't open a window. And I thought it was just, that might've just been my room, my experience. I had friends go back to these hotels and record the same air quality. So if they really cared about the health of their guests, they would allow us to breathe air that wasn't polluted with someone else's exhalation. It would be interesting to create like a video or an animation where you gave what's invisible to us color. Like if we could actually see, like, oh, the oxygen is blue and the carbon dioxide in the air is red, and every room you entered, you would immediately know our relationship to all of this would be very different. I think that you know how there's food ratings here. There's cleanliness ratings. There's A, B, and C. I think there should be the same. Oh, right, like on restaurants. Yeah, on restaurants. Here's what the air is like in here. Oh, wow, that's wild. What brought you into this world, the world of breath, to begin with? It started off with a bunch of respiratory problems that I had for years and years. I lived in San Francisco for a very long time, and I surfed a lot. So every winter I would get bronchitis and mild pneumonia, which I was told by my doctor was normal and fine until around the fourth year of having that happen. It was getting worse and worse. They'd give me antibiotics, which at the time, this was 14 years ago, I thought was a good idea. We now know not so much. and it was a doctor friend of mine that suggested I go to a breathwork class, which is something I never, ever thought about doing. And that was my real entry into this world. So what happened in that breathwork class? What kind of breathwork class was it? I completely had a meltdown, sort of literally. I started sweating profusely in ways I've never sweated before, even though I was just sitting cross-legged in a cold room in San Francisco, breathing in this very specific rhythm. And for days after that, I felt really, really good in ways I hadn't felt before. And this is not proof of anything. I want to make that clear. But I've never had one of those problems since. I went to that breathwork class and learned how to breathe properly, which was something I had never considered. I always thought that breathing was a binary thing, something you did or didn't do. And once I learned how to breathe properly, I haven't had those issues. Again, there's a control version of me, so we don't know if that's what did it. But I know how I felt, and I know how I reacted to it, so it made me curious. So this is essentially an inciting incident that prompts you diving deep down the rabbit hole, like years of investigative journalism to understand what is going on with breath. It was a personal thing for me. I wanted to figure out my own health, and it obviously benefited me. And then a few years after that, I was assigned to write about freedivers, the World Freediving Championship. So these are the best breathers in the world. You know, people that have learned how to breathe so well that they can hold the breath for eight minutes, nine minutes, ten minutes at a time. And so I saw the limits and the potential of breathing from that experience. And it was still years and years after that before I thought that there might be a larger story here. Did you take that assignment to learn about freediving as a result of these revelations from practicing breath work, or were those independent variables? No, I took the assignment from money. I was a freelance journalist at the time. An editor at Outside called me up and said, do you want to go to Greece for a couple of weeks, and we'll pay you this much. I said, of course, I want to go to Greece for a couple of weeks. But I didn't connect the two things at the time. it wasn't until I was actually out there seeing these people do their thing. And I got a training with a world-renowned freediver. And in about 40 minutes, I was able to hold my breath three and a half minutes, which I thought seemed impossible. I said, wow, if you can do this in a 40-minute long session, what can you do after a few weeks or a few years? What else can this thing do for us? Freediving is such an interesting subculture. I've had freedivers on here. I occasionally co-host a show with my friend Adam Skolnick who wrote this book called One Breath. I don't know if you know Adam. And so I'm familiar with that world. And I too have – I happen to be in Malta. And there was a world champion, retired world champion freediver there who I spent a day with him. And he took me through the paces. And what's interesting about those athletes is they come in all shapes and forms. They don't. There's not a single body type or archetype. then you can't tell by looking at someone whether they're good at this particular discipline or not. And the training is not what you would think. It dovetails perfectly with all these things that you're talking about. It's yoga training. I mean, that's what it is. It's mostly pranayama. It's a bunch of ancient techniques to allow you to access your lungs, access the full potential of them to allow them to inflate properly, to allow you to tolerate more carbon dioxide. That's the real main thing, to tolerate more CO2 and to do it comfortably. And so they're just doing something relatively new, at least in the competitive sense, with very ancient techniques that we've been doing, that humans have been doing for thousands of years. Obviously, some are better or more gifted at this, But the real takeaway or the epiphany is that developing your CO2 tolerance is something that we can all do and we can all improve because we never even think about it. Like there's room for massive improvement for all people. Yeah, and once you do that, you can not only hold your breath and be able to free dive a lot better, but it's extremely effective for people with anxiety and for people with asthma and even people with some forms of COPD. So I've seen this time and time again. You ask an asthmatic to hold their breath, and the chances are they're going to go. Because they've been breathing so dysfunctionally. They've been over-breathing for so many years that the slightest increase of CO2 in their system sets off alarm bells. Same thing with people with anxiety. This is not a theory. This is a fact. This has been around for a long time. Talk a little bit about chronic lifestyle ailments and the connection to the breath, because that's quite a leap. It's quite a leap. It seemed like too much of a leap when I heard this from researchers way back in the day, seven, eight years ago, until they showed me their data, and until I talked to a dozen researchers who were all saying the exact same thing. So if you look at something like asthma, so what's the cause of asthma? no one really knows you know sometimes it's you know bronchial tubes or or yeah allergens that close down the so why would someone suddenly get asthma had they not had asthma before and they suddenly get it and now they just have asthma for the rest of their life what i've learned from a lot of people who study this all the time is it usually happens after a chronic sickness right where you're congested for a very very long time And maybe that lasts for a couple of weeks. And then mouth breathing becomes a default for you. So everything you just mentioned, our nose is our first line of defense against allergens, against viruses, against bacteria. We have all these different structures, different hair that can help filter all that stuff out. It also releases nitric oxide, which kills these things on contact. So six times more nitric oxide breathing through the nose and the mouth. We know all of this. So if you look at someone with asthma who suddenly gets asthma and is told that this is a chronic condition they're going to have to have for the rest of their life, you have to go back and say, well, what caused that condition to begin with? And can we address that problem? And I've talked to so many asthmatics, probably hundreds and hundreds of asthmatics, who were told that they were going to be on bronchodilators and oral steroids the rest of their lives, who figured out a way of breathing better specifically slowly and through the nose, who no longer have any symptoms of asthma. That's astonishing. But it's out there. There's a few dozen studies that show this time and time again. I know respiratory therapists that treat asthmatics all day long, over and over, over the years. And almost all of them, almost all of them, will show a significant reduction of symptoms. And a smaller percentage will show a complete, being completely resolved. Like there's no more symptoms of asthma. Does that mean it's going to come back one day? Maybe. But at the time, it's not there. And I think it's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this and exploring this as a path. What are the side effects of breathing better if you have asthma? Zero. What are the side effects of taking oral steroids for a few decades? I can give you a whole laundry list, you know, from diabetes to autoimmune issues to so many other chronic conditions. So in my opinion, if I had asthma or if I knew someone who had asthma, start with the breathing part of it. Keep taking your medications. Those medications are amazing. They keep so many people alive. But what is the core reason you have asthma? For so many people who suddenly got asthma, why did that happen? I would explore that a little more. This episode is brought to you by AG1. You know it. You love it. One thing I've noticed about this time of year, especially February, is that all those routines that you promise to adopt or to adhere to in the new year, well, they tend to get a little wobbly around this time of year. January starts out with all this motivation and structure, And then, you know, life happens, travel, late nights, people in town, work stuff stacking up. And suddenly the days don't quite look as clean as they did a few weeks ago. And for me, that's where the small, consistent things matter the most. And AG1 is one of those anchors in my morning. It's not about doing something dramatic or reinventing everything. It's just simple, super easy, convenient, just takes a minute habit that I can maintain no matter what or how scattered the rest of my life happens to be. One scoop in cold water first thing, and that's my baseline. The way I think about it is this. AG1 is a daily health drink that helps fill in common nutrient gaps. It's got a broad range of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients from whole foods, over 75 ingredients in total, and it's there to support things like steady energy, immune health, and overall daily function. Not as a replacement for real food, just as support. I drink it at home, I take it with me when I travel, And it's just one of those things that keeps my routine feeling tethered even when my schedule isn't. So try it for yourself. Visit drinkag1.com slash richroll and get three AG1 travel packs and vitamin D3 plus K2 free in your welcome kit with your first subscription order. That's drinkag1.com slash richroll. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. it's february now which if you're in a relationship is a month that kind of sneaks up on you and puts you under the spotlight whether you're married you're dating you're single or somewhere in between we're all still learning how to navigate connection communication and what we actually need in our relationships and i don't know about you guys but i'm ill-equipped to do that alone i need to talk it out, preferably with a professional, because therapy is just such an effective tool to sort out my thinking and emotions so I can make the best decisions, which is why millions of people turn to BetterHelp. Whether you're working on a relationship or working on yourself, BetterHelp can give you the tools to help you understand what feels heavy, what's getting in the way, and how to take some of that pressure off. And BetterHelp makes it easy to get started. You answer a short questionnaire, and they match you with a fully licensed therapist who works according to a strict code of conduct. And if it doesn't feel like the right fit, you can switch to a different therapist at any time. With over 30,000 licensed therapists, BetterHelp has served more than 6 million people worldwide with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash richroll. That's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P dot com slash richroll. The connection between short mouth breathing and how that impacts our nervous system and creates sort of a low-grade chronic state of anxiety and stress, there's a clear path or a clear connection between that and hypertension. And I've hosted enough experts on this show to know that chronic elevated blood pressure is, you know, all these chronic diseases are sort of downstream of that, right? So if your nervous system is constantly agitated, yes, you don't want to – it's a good idea to extract yourself from situations that stress you. But what you really want is to be more resilient. You want a better response to things that used to stress you out. and by altering this way of breathing, you can modulate your nervous system so that you're not in this chronic state of stress and by proxy, better manage your blood pressure. This is a core idea that you're putting forth in the book. And it's true. This is another thing. It's not going to work for everybody, but it works for a lot of people, and this is something that's been studied and been used for almost 100 years, is to develop ways of breathing more slowly, to relax yourself, to breathe into your diaphragm, to increase your CO2 so blood flows more easily. So the mechanics of that make sense to me. But to keep it up throughout the day is a whole different thing. There's even some technology, some wearables, that just train you to sit and breathe slowly for 10 minutes and hope that that bleeds into lower blood pressure. If you have chronically high blood pressure, you can see what it does for you. I've never seen someone with very high blood pressure not see a significant decrease in their numbers by just breathing more slowly. But again, how realistic is that throughout the day? It depends who you are and how well you can adapt to a new habit. When you talk about chronic lifestyle ailments, I mean, the number one killer is obviously heart disease. We're seeing this gigantic rise in type 2 diabetes. Is there a connection between breathing and those? Are you out on your skis for that? What does that look like? Well, you mentioned high blood pressure being this gateway to all of these other diseases. You can also say the same about poor sleep and sleep apnea. So a lot of these chronic diseases that I'm talking about, from diabetes to heart disease to increased risk of stroke to dementia, can be related to sleep apnea. I mean, people have been talking about this for decades and decades. So that's very clear. We know that right now. Why are people suffering from sleep apnea? So weight is one thing to do, right? The lateral compression of an oversized neck pushing on the airway. But the mouth size has a lot to do with that, too. That's why one of the interventions right now is to make the mouth bigger, to push the mouth forward, right, to create more space at the back to allow for more airflow. So I think that a lot of people are looking into improving their sleep. Some people are taking melatonin. Some people are into the whole red light thing at night. I certainly am. I love it. But they're not looking at their breathing. So you can do all of those other things, but if you don't have your breathing locked in, if you're still choking on yourself every single night, I don't care what you do or what you eat, you're always going to be sick. And the solution to that is put a big piece of tape across your mouth. Not for everybody. Absolutely not. Some people selling sleep tape would tell you just that. Everyone needs it. I'm here to say you do not. It depends. What's the you? Like how do you improve your breathing during sleep when you're unconscious? Well, what's the issue? Right, right. What is the foundational issue that is causing you to breathe so poorly at night? You have to address that first, and everyone's different. That's why I don't like these blanket prescriptions where people are like, everyone should be wearing sleep tape, everyone should be on CPAP. I don't think it's realistic for people. For some people, I'm one of them, and a lot of other people I know are also in this camp. Using that little piece of tape has completely changed their sleep quality. I mean, massively. And the good news is it's not just subjective. Like you put it on, you're breathing through your nose, say, yeah, I feel better this morning. That's cool. It's so easy to track sleep now. So you can wear any wearable you want that tracks sleep, and you can see this improvement. At least that was my experience of tracking every little factor of sleep and seen the extreme difference that it made going from mouth breathing to nasal breathing. It was so vast and so sudden that there's no question about it for me. I think I need a mouth tape with a stronger adhesive because I wake up and it inevitably, you know, it's off. But one that won't rip my skin off. I'm going to help you with that after hours. Okay. We'll explore that. Because I'm doing it, and I like tracking my sleep, and what I've dialed in on now are my stress levels through the night. The impact of food on those stress levels, when I eat, what I eat, how to set myself up for low stress levels throughout the night. And that's been fascinating. Obviously, the nose breathing thing, I think, has the potential to take it to a new level. What could be the most stressful thing that could ever affect you while you're sleeping? The idea that your body is constantly being strangled every few seconds. And this is what people suffering from sleep apnea go through. Over and over and over again. So their stress levels are absolutely peaking. Their glucose is up, right? They're in this sympathetic state as they're trying to get to sleep. They aren't able to go into those deep restorative stages of sleep because they're constantly waking up. And how many people have sleep apnea in this country? Like what's the percent? 20%? You know, that's the higher percent. You know, maybe the lower is 12, 12, 13. So, and CPAPs work. They absolutely work. 50% of people aren't going to use them after a few months, right? And they're going to be too embarrassed to tell their doctor that. So what's the core issue and how can you improve that breathing? If you have sleep apnea, you have to do whatever you possibly can to get rid of that. I would say before you do anything else. And once you have it, and you have it for long enough, as you know, that whole doorway that was maybe smaller for hypertension is very wide to all those other diseases, right? They're going to get you. There's no hiding from them. The best way to illustrate the potency of this, I think, is for you to describe the Stanford experiment. Can you talk about that? Yeah. I still have a little PTSD from that. It's only 10 days. It's 20 days. Oh, well, you have a 10 in the paint, right? That's okay. 10 in the paint, trying to get a little more sympathy. It's not working. So after having so many of these conversations like what we're having right now, right, when I was researching this, I was trying to figure it out. I was like, well, if it's so bad, we should be able to track it, right? We should be able to see how bad mouth breathing is and how it's going to affect our sleep and how it's going to affect our stress levels and how it's going to affect this, this or that. So I had this grand idea to get about 40 people into this large study with the chief of rhinology research at Stanford who seemed to be on board. But there's zero money for this kind of thing. And nobody's ever actually conducted an experiment like this that seems so obvious. Wouldn't we want to know the difference between mouth breathing and nose breathing? Put it in the lab. We do mechanically, right? We know that this piece, this piece, this piece. But not any kind of population longitudinal study. He said it was unethical because he was aware of the extreme damage it would cause these people. And he didn't want to be liable to having all of these complaints for these people that were suffering from extreme stress. And I asked him, I said, okay, I guess I understand that. And we had no money for it. It was going to cost like half a million dollars, some insane amount. I said, well, what's the maximum amount of people that you would allow to do this? Like, I'll do it. And he said, okay, that's fine. I said, let me find at least one other person to do it. So we had to pay for it. We had to pay for the study at Stanford. Stanford, very hard up for money. They do not have money. But he allowed us access to his lab, which was huge. And they have like a sleep lab there, have they not? They have it all. So we didn't have access to the sleep lab, but we had access to all of his rhinology equipment, and he was able to get us buddy deals with the pulmonary function tests and all that stuff. So the study was very simple. It was 10 days of forced mouth breathing followed by 10 days of nasal breathing. And the nasal breathing. All other variables controlled for. Controlled for all, including exactly what we were to eat and when we were eating it. So we were very specific about that. And everything we thought would happen, happened. I mean, there were no surprises to this. And sleep was the biggest one. It was so extreme and so sudden that it made me feel really, really bad for people who are suffering from so many chronic ailments and don't realize it's tied to their sleep and it's tied to their breathing through the mouth all the time. The results were so dramatic and impacted me so significantly that I wrote down some of the findings from this study. Because I really want anyone who's listening or watching to really hear this. Your snoring went up 1,300% within 24 hours. You developed sleep apnea within days. Your blood pressure spiked 13 points into stage 1 hypertension. Your HRV plummeted, which is a metric that measures stress, obviously. You had a spike in your stress-related hormones. You developed a bacterial infestation in the nose with a sinus infection kind of on the horizon. Fatigue, brain fog, irritation, anxiety. Olsen, the guy that you did the study with, he went from zero snoring to four hours of snoring a night. Also developed sleep apnea. But here's the kicker. Immediate recovery from all of these when you start breathing through the nose at night, taping the mouth. 48 hours later, all of that snoring and all the sleep apnea was completely gone. That is unbelievable. That's unbelievable. It's unbelievable for people who don't study it. But for people who actually study sleep and airway stuff, you look at what happens during allergy season, sleep apnea and snoring go through the roof. Why would that be? Because your nose is plugged up and you're breathing through the mouth. So it's one thing to read these studies, though, and another thing to experience it and to experience feeling so crappy in the morning, like so tired, so lethargic, so irritable. You know, the first few days we were kind of laughing about it. We're like, yeah, this really sucks. And then after day eight or nine, like we were just really pissed off. And as I mentioned, it made me really sad, especially for kids who are chronically congested, who are suffering from these issues and no one's addressing it. You know, they're giving them this or that and telling them they need to shape up or ship out, but they're not looking at the core issue for so many kids. It's sleep-affy, sleep-disordered breathing. This brings us to perhaps your spiciest take, which is the relationship between the development of ADHD in young people and dysfunctional sleep. So what is your thesis on this? So when I first wrote the book, the first edition, I did not know any of this stuff. And then I went on the road and spoke at a bunch of dental conferences, the places you wouldn't think that an airway person or someone who wrote a book about breath would be speaking at, but these dentists are really, they're taking over the airway because no one else is doing it. They're the ones who told me about this. They said there is this epidemic of ADHD. 10% of the kids in this country have ADHD, right? I don't think anyone's going to argue that. But what is the cause of ADHD? What is the cause? We're told it's a neurological condition. It's a problem with the brain and it's treated as such, right? And the drugs work. You can give kids uppers in the morning to wake them up. You can give them downers at night to put them to sleep. Those things absolutely work. But what is causing it? And a bunch of researchers are now saying, I'm not one of them. I'm just the filter for these guys. We should clarify that you're not a clinician. I am not a clinician. I am not a doctor. I am paid to go out and speak to dozens and dozens of these people, which is what I've done, that's why I revised the paperback with new sections, including this, because I think it's so important, is these kids are, you know, ADHD is considered a neurological condition, but what's causing it? And they have found around 70 to 80 percent of kids with ADHD suffer from sleep disordered breathing. Then they went back through the data and they said, what happens when you remove tonsils from a kid, right? You have inflamed tonsils, right? It's hard to breathe through the nose. You default to breathing through the mouth. What happens when the adenoids are inflamed and you remove those? Adenoids also require you to breathe through the mouth, right? It's hard to breathe through the nose. They found that well over 50% of kids that had these surgeries to clear their airways, their symptoms of ADHD disappeared. So they said, huh, this is interesting. Could there be a link that sleep disorder breathing, a kid suffering from chronic sleep apnea, waking up tired, being irritable, not able to think, not able to focus, is this actually a sleep problem, right? And then that causes downstream effects to brain development. We know that if you suffer from sleep disorder breathing, if you suffer from sleep apnea, it will affect your growth because you release human growth hormone in stages of sleep and you're not able to enter into those stages of sleep when you're constantly choking on yourself. It will affect your brain development. It will affect your ability to focus throughout the day. So this is what is coming up right now. There's still a lot more work to do. It's extremely controversial stuff. But on the outset, from an outsider's view, there's no advantage for me to believe one guy and not believe the other. I'm not trying to position myself to one specific narrative. But if you're just looking at the data here, it starts to make a lot of sense. And I want to be super clear. I'm not saying all cases of ADHD are caused by sleep disorder breathing. I would never say that. I'm saying that many kids that have been diagnosed with ADHD could have an underlying sleep disorder breathing problem that is causing a lot of those symptoms. And I think that that is one of the First things I would check out if you had one of those kids. It certainly seems worthy of scientific exploration. A lot of young people developing ADHD, but also we're all chronic mouth breathers, so everybody's sleep disrupted, and none of us are getting enough restorative sleep, and there's lots of other kinds of neurological disorders that we're suffering from, which, you know, kind of elevates the stakes of sleep hygiene and how we think about sleeping. We are in a moment when there's more awareness around this, but it's really around cognitive function and just longevity. But in terms of childhood development, I've never heard anybody speak about this. And, you know, I'm just reflecting on my own life. You know, I'm a kid of the 70s, you know, terrible orthodontic problems, allergies, getting allergy shots in the doctor's office every week. teeth extracted, and I've been diagnosed with ADHD by many a psychiatrist. So it's like I'm the trisecta of all of this. Well, it's a spectrum. So ADHD is a spectrum, and your dysfunctional breathing is a spectrum too. So I'm not saying that everyone who is breathing through the mouth, around 50% of people, maybe 30, it's closer to 35, 40, 40% of people, sleep with their mouth closed. So they don't need sleep tape. They don't need any of that. If you're breathing through your mouth, but you're breathing very quietly and slowly, it's not going to do any favors to your oral microbiome, but it's probably not going to disrupt those stages of sleep as severely if you're choking on yourself. And so that's the big distinction here. If you are not able to take a fluid breath in and out without pausing, pausing as so many people suffer from this it is going to affect your brain and it's going to affect your physical health it's going to affect it if you're a kid it's going to affect you i'm imagining the parent that's uh listening to this or watching this right now who has a young child who's suddenly terrified about this uh and is five minutes away from emailing you asking you what to do about it Because if they were to go to their general clinician or therapist or psychiatrist and they raise this issue, it's not going to be well received. No, it's not. So they write me. So I've heard from thousands of these people. And what's interesting is the people who had heard about this stuff and then go in and record their kids' sleep at night. There are a few apps that are free that you can do this. You put your phone in there. It records the sound of you breathing at night and it gives you this nice little graph when you wake up in the morning. And you can go back and listen to your kid breathing at any time. And they are so horrified to what they've found. And so they're the ones that are taking control of their kid's health and they're training them to breathe through the nose They training them to breathe properly Okay These same parents write back a couple weeks later and they tell me the vast majority of their kids issues are completely resolved. The kid who's 12 years old is still wetting his bed on a whole different cycle of drugs for the last five, six years. Suddenly it's all gone. I'm not saying this is going to work for everyone. You know, I'm saying if your kid is snoring very loudly, you can hear it. If they're choking on themselves at night, it is going to affect them. And that might manifest into symptoms that appear like ADHD. Yeah, I've heard you say that these symptoms often disappear within two weeks once the breathing is corrected and the child is finally obtaining restorative sleep. Is all of this evidence anecdotal, or is there any scientific rigor being brought to understanding this? I would not guarantee that with anybody. By the way, I'm saying some people have reported that to me anecdotally. But if you've also talked to the airway specialists who focus on this stuff, Christian Yimeno at Stanford was there for 40, the father of sleep medicine, right? And if you start reading this research of people when they resolve the airway issue, what happens to the symptoms of ADHD, that's very clear. And there's a ton of research done on that. I would really hope a researcher would be listening to me and questioning me and saying this sounds like complete crap. And if they're interested in actually putting a study to do this, a study together to do this, it's not that hard to do it, right? And I think that a lot of that is starting to happen now because so many parents are so pissed off. And for some reason, I'm the one on the receiving line of these complaints. There's no other resource for them. No, there's not. They're dentists. If they find an airway-focused dentist, that's where you go because the dentist can say, yes, your kid has a problem. Here's the solution, right? That's what you want. You don't want to just know your kid is sick and is going to get sicker. You want to find what the core issue is, then you want to fix it. What about adults with ADHD? Is there any indication that the symptomology can be ameliorated through more restorative sleep? Or is this just something that we understand a little bit better with young people? We understand it much better with young people. With adults and ADHD, if you are suffering from poor sleep that is tied to poor breathing habits, I can't imagine that that wouldn't affect how you're able to think and function in the conscious world once you wake up. I wish that there was a large study, if somebody could fund that and put that together, looking at doing breathing interventions specifically with adults with ADHD who are either snoring or have mild sleep apnea, to take care of that and then trace them to see how they're doing afterwards. I'd be very, very curious. One of the amazing benefits of wearing this Whoop device, which is pretty great in terms of being a sleep tracker, is not just noticing trends like I mentioned earlier, but providing these non-intuitive insights. I'll have a decent night of sleep and I feel fine. And then I'll be shocked to look at, because it'll break down how many hours you spend in these various phases, right? like how much time spent deep REM and light, but also the amount of time that you were actually awake. And it's pretty stunning to sleep through the night and not think that you were ever awake at all and see all of these dots along the green periods where you were technically awake, even if you don't remember or you weren't conscious of being awake. And I would imagine there is some relationship between that and your breathing pattern. That's how they track sleep apnea, right? The apnea, hypopnea index, the AHI. Every time you do it, you're kind of getting shocked out of your potentially deeper state of restorative sleep. I just want to be super clear. Sleep tape is not going to resolve all your problems. It depends what your issue is. If it's structural, if you have a structural problem and you can't breathe through your nose adequately, sleep tape is a terrible idea. I would never, ever do it, which is why you have to practice using it in the daytime for a couple of weeks to slowly acclimate to it. Don't run out and get a little piece of tape and try to do it tonight. That's what I did, and it was a disaster. I hated it. It took me a few weeks to acclimate to it, and that was six, seven years ago, and now I have so much trouble sleeping without it. Also, if you're chronically inflamed, then you're going to have all kinds of phlegm. Like, this is going to be problematic, you know, like, you know, like breathing to your nose. If you have already, you know, some serious health conditions or you're just in a chronic state of inflammation, that is impinging upon your ability to breathe through the nose. You have to use common sense. You really have to use common sense and go go slow and low. It's absolutely not for everybody, especially if you're one of those people who already breathe with their mouth closed at night, then you don't need it. Let's get into solutions. It's one thing to say, hey, everybody, you know, start breathing a little more deeply and through the nose. But for somebody who's brand new to these ideas, what is a, like, formal practice to initiate somebody into, you know, this new way of living? And then how should we think about it throughout our day in less formal ways? I think the number one thing you need to do, this sounds like old news at this time, is you have to become an obligate nasal breather, especially at night, but in the day as well. There are a lot of different ways to do that. It depends on your level of commitment in doing this. So at minimum, when you are working, when you're answering emails, when you're doing dishes, when you're sitting around the house and not exerting a lot of effort, you should be breathing in and out of your nose. One way of training yourself to do this, it's very goofy, is to use that little piece of tape. Start off with 10 minutes in front of your computer answering emails in the morning. If that's comfortable, extend it to 20 minutes. If that's comfortable, maybe a few days later, extend it to an hour. And slowly acclimate yourself to it. Once you start breathing more slowly and correctly in the day, what they've found is that tends to bleed over into how you breathe at night. So you tend to carry those habits. There are a bunch of different hacks you can do at night. So that's the daytime protocol. There's a zillion different ways you can become. We'll talk about working out, which is a whole different kind of worm. Yeah, I want to get to that. But this is the relaxed sitting around. Now, I should not be able to see your shoulders moving up and down as you're breathing, right? There should be the slightest expansion in your belly area, this abdominal area when you're inhaling and exhaling. I shouldn't really be able to see the chest moving either. So you think about a monk, how a monk breathes when he or she is meditating. You don't see them breathe at all. It's so smooth and so quiet. And this is allowing the body to stay in that parasympathetic zone so it can restore and get you ready for when you're going to stress it out. At night, it's a little more complicated, right? It depends, again, where you are on that spectrum of poor breathing. If you're someone who just breathes through the mouth but there isn't any obstruction, then the sleep tape thing can work for you. It might work for you. I'll say it that way. And the sleep tape protocol is basically what I just told you. You have to go low and slow for a number of weeks before you really can adapt to this. And it's going to suck for a long time. But once you get over that hump, I've found it becomes an essential part of your sleep regimen. That's what it has been for me and so many other people that I've heard from. What is your sense of the efficacy of those strips that people put on the bridge of their nose? There's a guy on the Internet who loves to do this. He's an influencer guy, Hormosey. But a lot of athletes do this. You see it in the NBA and the NFL, et cetera. Have you experimented with that? Is there research on that? These are great training wheels. So I think these things are awesome, especially at the beginning. There's a bunch of different hacks you can do once you're training yourself to breathe through the nose at night, right? If you take your two fingers right now and you go like this, if that is significantly easier to breathe that way, then you could be someone who has some sort of compromised nasal passageway here. You have this nasal valve collapse. For some people, when they breathe in, the nostrils flutter. for other people. The nostrils just aren't big enough. So if that's a lot easier for you, then these strips, which can allow for about 30% more airflow, can really, really help. So I suggest to people, when they're trying to use that sleep tape at night, get one of these strips. There's a zillion different versions of this. I'm not backing it. I don't promote these things. I'm not tied to any of these companies. It just depends on what you're into. But they can really, really help, and they can help reduce snoring significantly for some people as well. My stepson, he recently got a procedure to have a deviated septum corrected. He's 29. He's gone his whole life with this issue, and it has changed his life. How many people have this problem? and I would imagine you're in favor of these issues like this being corrected as soon as possible. I asked Jayak or Nayak at Stanford because he took a scan of my head and my nasal cavities and everything in my mouth and he said I was a disaster. He said, he's like, you're a perfect candidate for surgery. I was like, oh no, what do I need to do? He's like, it's all wrong up there. I broke my nose two or three times and I got it fixed. So then he told me something else. He said around 80% of us, 80% of us have a septum that is clearly deviated to the naked eye. It's clearly deviated. 80% of the population does not need the surgery, right? The body adapts. It depends where you are on that spectrum. If you have someone who literally can't breathe out of one nostril because the septum is so clearly deviated, then get that fixed. Absolutely. But for a lot of us, it has less to do with the structure and more to do with the tissues constantly being inflamed. And some of that is caused by chronic mouth breathing. So that's what he told me. So it depends where you are on that. But I've heard from so many people that have had these surgeries, it's life-changing. It's life-changing to their sleep fitness. It's life-changing to their athletic performance, to just being able to focus. There's a lot of breathwork practitioners out there. Good ones. It's a spectrum. I think it's great that there are people out there and that this has become, you know, something that people are interested in. I think we can all we can only benefit from that. But there's so many different modalities, you know, from Wim Hof to various forms of Pranayama, et cetera. So I want to simplify this for the audience who's new to these ideas. I mean, you have this like 5.5 second kind of protocol. Yeah, this is a little complicated to me because I feel the same way as you do. I think it's great that people are becoming more aware of their breath, right? And they're going to seek out different breathwork practices and different techniques and reading books about ancient yogic practices. There's a bit of analysis paralysis. There's a bit of that, and also I think they're jumping the gun. I think unless you are able to be a normal breather first, then I would not bother with any of those other things. You have to become a normal breather. So I know so many people who suffer from sleep apnea or mouth breathing all the time who go do Wim Hof and they get really high and feel great for a couple of hours afterwards. And then they feel like crap the rest of the time. Because you're just back to your mouth breathing. Yeah. I mean, would you just go out and run an ultramarathon? if you couldn't walk up three flats of stairs. No, you have to train yourself to do this. And the problem is it's so unsexy wearing sleep tape. It's so unsexy getting normal breathing down when you could be hanging out with a bunch of people in white robes and gongs. Like who doesn't want to be around the gong and some white robes and some illustrious retreats doing breath work? That's so hot. but it's not going to do you much good if you can't breathe normally first. So you have to lock that in, and this is exactly how yoga used to work. Yoga was not taught to sick people. You have to get well. You have to be normal, and then it was meant to put you up that next rung of human potential. I think breathwork works in the same way. Once you're a normal breather, these breathwork practices are so incredibly powerful, but in order to really get the most out of them, you need to have your basics down. And so to orient a new person around these basics, I want to get back to something formal that somebody could do perhaps once or twice a day while also throughout their day being more mindful of breathing through their nose. Okay, so there's the nasal breathing thing. And so what you can do right now is just take one pump, It doesn't matter which one. Place it right below your belly button. Place another on your chest here. And when you breathe in through your nose, you want to feel your gut being loose enough that you feel that expansion. And when you exhale, you want to feel your gut gently coming back in. Okay? There should be not a lot of movement in your chest. just focus down near your belly button making that hand move out as you breathe in and as you exhale making that hand move back in about 90 of the people that i've asked to do this cannot do this well what's tricky about this i have no problem making sure that my chest doesn't move but i can move my muscles in my abdomen and press it in and out without without that being connected to my diaphragm. I know. You're a yogi. You're an athlete. You're very advanced in that regard, right? That would be the goal is to be able to have full control over chest, belly, right lung, left lung, and you can get there. But this is just the first basic biomechanic that you need to get down. And you would be surprised the average Joe Schmo, you ask them to do this, and they cannot move their belly because their diaphragm is not descending down here. It's locked in this position. Your hand is, for those that are listening, your hand is around your sternum. Yes, yes. So all the time it's locked in this high position. It's not descending to where it needs to be. So along with training yourself to be breathing in and out through the nose, you should focus on these biomechanics. Set an alarm on your phone maybe four times a day at the beginning to just take notice of how you're breathing. And then place your hand down here, and then you breathe into it. When I say down here, I'm talking about place your hand down near your belly button and feel that belly slightly expand as you breathe in and contract when you breathe out. So some breath work people have you do this ten times a day. you pick something that's comfortable for you, all it is is a little bell, a little alarm to remind you of how you're breathing. And then eventually you'll be able to train yourself to breathe properly. So many people that go to vigorous pranayama classes, it doesn't matter if it's kundalini, it doesn't matter if it's Wim Hof, any of those, they're not breathing into their guts. They're just, you'll get high doing this, but trust me, if you're able to take a deep, full breath he'll go to a whole different place. Like if you watch how Wim breathes, this is how he breathes. This is the proper way of doing it. Those things, those extreme breathing practices have their place, but only in the context of ensuring that you're breathing properly throughout the day. Otherwise, they're not really of that much use. But one of the benefits of these more extreme practices, there's two that I want to talk about. But the first is one you address in the book, which is hormetic stress. Like if you're doing a Wim Hof method or you're doing holotropic breathing, like you're imposing a certain kind of stress on the body. So explain what that is, what's going on with your CO2 and your oxygen levels and what benefits you see in periodically engaging in this kind of behavior. So, so many of those vigorous breathwork practices are based on that. They purposely stress you out. A lot of people say, well, why do I want to be stressed out? I'm trying to become unstressed, right? I'm already too anxious. But what they do is they bottle up that stress into that 20-minute practice, right? So you let it all out, and then you start anew. Your stress vessel is empty at the end of it. And they do that by blowing it out, right? It's a pressure cooker. And Wim Hof Method, whoever is doing the vigorous 30 breaths who isn't stressed out is doing it incorrectly. It is meant to stress you out. What you do, for those of you not familiar with Wim Hof Method, it's around 30 very deep, very fast breaths. Through the mouth, through the nose, it doesn't matter. It's meant to stress you out. and then you hold your breath for two, three minutes, which is meant to calm you down. So you're flipping that switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic and back again. And this is training you to take control of your stress, right? Get it all out of the way in the morning so that you can have a more chill day. Holotropic breath works a little more logistical than that. It's three hours. It used to be three hours. Now they're doing these 40-minute long sessions. Do the three-hour one if you're going to do it. You've got to do the real hard one. That's three hours of stress, and it's not meant to be done every day like Wim Hof Method. It's meant to be done every year or every decade or whatever, but it's really, really hard, and it's supposed to reset you. When you're breathing this vigorously, you're blowing off so much CO2. You're becoming extremely alkaline that weird things start happening in your brain. You're cutting off the blood flow to your brain, around 40% of the blood flow when you really get into the deep stages of these breathing practices, it's cut off from your brain. So it causes hallucinations. It causes you to reflect differently on your life and a whole bunch of other good stuff. Yeah, it is a peak experience for sure. I've done this many times and had a variety of experiences with it. You get the tetanay, you know, your fingers start to claw and your arms go up like this. And when you finally get through the really heavy breathing part of it, there's this, you're so oxygenated, you feel like you go an hour without needing to breathe at all, and there's this sense of floating. But the second piece is this consciousness-altering aspect of it that can, like any psychedelic experience, can deliver a positive or a very negative kind of reaction, and I've had both. And so that's a different thing. Like there's an emotional piece to that. And it's an interesting way of connecting with your body. It's a way of turbocharging your connection with how powerful the breath can be as a means of altering your consciousness. Like it locks that in. Like, well, clearly, like this is like, you know, like who would have known? You know what I mean? But this is not a daily, you know, habit. And I think that's what's cool about the breathwork practices that people are doing is someone that doesn't, maybe they're a very dysfunctional breather and they just happen to go to a half an hour breathwork session. At least it makes them aware that this is a very powerful tool, and that tool can be used to do a bunch of good things for you, but if you do it incorrectly, you're not going to be able to access that balance that your body is craving throughout the day, especially at night as it's trying to restore. The interesting thing about Wim Hof is that the cold exposure piece seems to be the piece that gets the most attention, but it's really about the breath. and he kind of exploded on the radar in the wake of submitting himself to an experiment in which he basically said, like, you can expose me to, what was it, E. coli, an E. coli infection, and I'm not going to get sick because I can manipulate my physiology through the breath. This is something that has been practiced by yogis for, I don't know, millennia. And so I'm really interested in what you learned through immersing yourself or sort of, you know, dropping into some of these yogi cultures and spending time with these masters of breath. I found that almost all of them were saying the same thing in different ways. The breath work modalities were so similar. So we call it Wim Hof method. Yeah, I mean, I told them just as much. I was like, you're just doing what these yogis were doing forever, you know. He found a way to make it, he could communicate it to a large group of people, which is great, but he didn't invent the modality. And he'll admit that, but what a spokesperson for it, right? I think people wanted to believe this or follow this crazy Dutch guy who's running up Everest barefoot, because the yogis just seemed, they're like, oh, they're just sitting in a room for three days. He gets them in the door by jumping into the freezing water. all that kind of stuff. So what I've found is they're just really saying the same thing. There are methods to create stress in your body that allows you to blow that gasket, right, to start anew. And then there are methods to create extreme calm by breathing very slowly and rhythmically. And they go by hundreds of different names in Hindu culture and ancient Chinese culture, in so many different cultures, Native American culture. But they're all doing the same thing. They've discovered the same thing at different times, completely independent of one another because it worked. The good news is nowadays we have instruments that can measure exactly how it works and what it does to our blood and our brains and more. You spent time with this guy, Swami Rami? No, I did not spend time. You spent a lot of time researching him. You researched him. Yeah. And this is a guy who claims that he could stop his heart. He didn't claim it. Like, this was a physicist, a Navy physicist, took him into a lab, and this story appeared in the New York Times magazine. Like, this is a real thing that happened. He was able to flutter his heart at 300 beats per minute on command and then return it to normal. He could change the temperature on his hand 11 degrees. from one spot to the other. This was recorded numerous times. People say, oh, that's a nice story. I'd like to see proof. It was all recorded. And this was huge news. This guy was on Donahue, if you remember Donahue. He was on ABC News. It was like 1974, I believe it's 74, that he just blew up. And this was everywhere. It was in scientific literature. And then he just sort of came and went. and no one really talks about him anymore, but foundational to everything that he did was breathing. That was where it started. You had to start at one point, and that was it, and then you developed the meditation and everything else after that. Do you remember that TV show called That's Incredible? I sure do. Do you remember the Yogi Kudu? I sure do. It's an acrylic box. We are, yeah, the only gym experts remember this. Yeah, I was going to say. This is a guy who had the most limber human body of all time, and he could contort himself and get himself inside this impossibly small lucite box, which they would then put at the bottom of a swimming pool for an interminable amount of time. He was able to lower his basal metabolic rate such that he could stay down there for an extremely long period of time. And this was like a network television. This was like a big TV show. John Davidson. Remember that? Kathy Lee. Kathy Lee Griffith. Before she was Kathy Lee Griffith, maybe. The football guy. Fran Tarkington. Why do I have this in my head and not like Shakespeare, Lyme, or something of purpose? Because we're firmly rooted in Gen X. We were raised on television, James. Herbert Benson went to India and recorded Tuma Monks doing the same thing. And this is a guy at Harvard Medical School who recorded this. These guys were able to lower their metabolism much lower than someone in a coma. Do it consciously as they're increasing heat in their bodies, 17 degrees in their extremities. Like, according to what we understand about the human body and medicine, biology, this shouldn't be possible. And yet, there's the data. Here's the videotape if you want to see it too. And it's interesting that, you know, I put some of these stories, sprinkled them into this book. And I still get flack from, quote, serious scientists. They're like, this is hearsay. It's not. These are studies that appeared in scientific literature. The Herbert Benson study appeared in Nature, like the most esteemed scientific journal that there is. So to me, it has more to do with someone trying to stay comfortable on their turf and with their specific line of thinking than wanting to explore what science really is. But the science is constantly changing. And if you're not changing with new data, then you're not a scientist. You hear these stories about these, you know, higher consciousness beings in India who are meditating in caves for years without eating any food. And they have attendants who kind of, you know, make sure that they're OK. But there's photographs of, you know, they dwindle down into looking like starvation victims. but they literally don't move. And there's the one who the guy held his arm up for like years. And it's just, you know, like these very strange stories. And it always leaves me, you know, maybe because I saw the yogi kudu when I was such a young kid. Like, I'm so interested in this. And I'm like Mulder, I want to believe. But is this apocryphal or is this really happening? But when you see these documented cases of meditators, the Tummo, Is that how you pronounce it? These Tibetan monks, they can lower their basal metabolic rate like 60% below coma levels. There is something going on here. I don't know about being a breatharian, these people who transcend eating food, but if you're capable of changing your physiology so severely, like lowering your metabolic rate to such a base level, then your caloric need drops to almost nothing, right? But it doesn't drop to zero. Yeah, exactly. This is my problem. So you're going to feed off your own body for a period of time. Getting by on 800 calories is different than getting by on zero. So this is my problem with the whole breatharian stuff or breatharian. Is it breatharian or breatharian? They're all so-called. It depends who you're talking to. I mean, it gets crazy. I've gotten some flack from some people. They're like, you know, why didn't you research that? I said, well, I did. And there are a ton of stories about this, awesome stories, like stories that you want to believe, right? You're like, cool. So that's that story of that guy in a cave. What's the story about taking that guy in a cave and putting him in a lab so that other people can watch him over a month not eat anything or not drink anything? Right. And the answer is there are none. So until somebody does that, they're great stories. It's like a dinner party story to talk about it, and it creates a sense of wonder and magic that's still in the world. But it doesn't mean anything to me journalistically or scientifically unless there are witnesses, unless the stuff is actually recorded and measured. Let's talk about the impact of breath on healthspan and longevity. In the longevity discourse, there's a lot of talk around VO2 max, grip strength, aerobic capacity. And here comes James Nestor, who's saying that's all fine and well, but actually it's really about lung capacity. Or this is the part that we're underappreciating maybe. This is the part we're underappreciating. Of course, VO2 matches are very important. Grip strength is very important. I think that all these things were in Venn diagrams. They're all bleeding into one another. It's hard to have one without the other. I think that lung capacity, if you look at the Framingham study, they found that this was a 70-year-long longitudinal study of people. They found that lung function was the most accurate marker of lifespan with lung function and lung size. So the sooner you lose your lung function, the sooner those lungs shrink up because everything is atrophying now and you're just breathing out of your chest, the sooner you're going to die. That's what the data said to them. So you wonder why yogis, one of the primary things that they're doing, whether they're sitting or standing, is they're breathing and stretching and stretching this way, breathing in there. They are maintaining and expanding their lung capacity because a larger fuel tank allows you to do more with less, fewer breaths for more energy, which is especially important as you grow older. The good news is because this is so underappreciated, I mean, we don't think about consciously trying to expand our lung capacity unless we're an athlete, that there's so much room for improvement. If we're walking around shallow mouth breathing all the time, through a pretty simple switch, we can take a giant step towards living healthier and longer. Well, even moderate exercise can increase lung capacity by 15%, almost 20%. So just doing moderate exercise. But if you add to that proper breathing biomechanics, all the things we just went over, nasal breathing, breathing deep, breathing slow, breathing low, you add to all of that, it's so much easier for you to maintain that lung capacity. And by right of that, you're maintaining healthier lungs because you don't have to constantly fight off pollutants and other allergens that you are breathing in through your mouth. To me, it's just very simple. I don't find that controversial at all. Let's talk about athletic performance. How do you think about what you understand around breath and how that plays into maximizing your physical output in an athletic context? Well, I think that this has become the latest, greatest thing for trainers, at least a few trainers I know. this is the number one thing that they train first before they do anything else, is CO2 tolerance and lung capacity, right? So they start with that because, again, it goes back to that fuel tank. If you're a competitive athlete, you want every advantage over your competitors as possible. So why would you want to be expending energy that you could be using to stay in the race for longer and to go faster. So to me, it's a very simple thing. If you are breathing dysfunctionally and you can get by, especially if you're young and you're a sprinter, you can get by, but you're not going to stay in the game for that long because your body is going to eventually break down. There's a reason why so many sprinters have so many respiratory problems, have this increased rate of asthma and respiratory issues. Oh, is that true? It's higher with sprinters? Yeah, that's why they're starting to retrain them. They were doing this back in the 60s. Sandy Richards Ross who was the for 10 years she was like the top sprint in the world Check out videos or pictures of her breathing as she sprinting Shoulders down mouth closed This is sprinting too This isn a marathon all through the nose you know, and I think that's one of the reasons why she kicked so much butt for so long. At least that's what she attributed it to. Like, how do you translate that into daily training habits? Are Are you saying that it would be beneficial for all athletes or a certain cohort of athletes to practice the same breathing regimen that freedivers train on to be more CO2 tolerant in their various disciplines? You could. I think basic biomechanics training, and this is something I don't even know if you need a trainer to do this. You can find resources online. Everything that we just did, you'd be surprised how many joggers could go out on the street and look at how many joggers are breathing in and out through their nose, right? It's maybe 5%. You know, almost everyone, it's bad news. So just start with those basics. And then once you get those basics down, depending on what you want to get out of this, if you're an extremely serious athlete, if you're a cyclist, that's going to be slightly different than someone who's a sprinter. If you're a swimmer, that's going to be different than someone who's a weightlifter. It's not going to work in swimming. In theory, I'm totally with you, but in practice, I've actually tried to run with mouth tape on just to see. I could do it if I'm going really slow, but even when I'm getting into a zone two, it just becomes very difficult. and that's probably because I'm lacking an adequate amount of CO2. I could train that and get better at that, obviously. Swimming, like when you're breathing, you kind of need to open up your mouth and get as much air as quickly as possible. I'm saying, but the biomechanics of that mouth breathing, right, you can optimize those to be doing it better. You're not breathing that way like competitive swimmers in a pool. They're breathing for a few laps, right? And for someone who's out open water swimming, They have to have the proper biomechanics to be doing that. And I doubt if they're breathing through their mouth when they're not in a pool. They could be. That could be their habit. But it depends what specifically you're doing. Like weightlifting is really technical with how you're breathing and how you're bracing. I'm not an expert in that. I'm just saying that this is a fundamental thing, how you're getting the majority of your energy is through your breath. It's not through food and drink. It's through your breathing. And you have to be doing that. in an efficient way if you're going to be competitive. There was a moment where those masks were really popular. Have you played around with those? What is your take on those? They still are. That is increasing your CO2 tolerance. I've never heard of anyone that has not trained a sprinter. If you actually do the training to get your CO2, I've never heard of anyone that hasn't increased their performance and decreased their recovery times by increasing their CO2 tolerance because you're taking fewer breaths. If, you know, running for a minute, you're taking 30 breaths through your mouth, if you're lowering that to 12, that is going to have a huge impact on your body, and your body's going to be a lot happier with not having to do that amount of work to get so much more oxygen, so much more efficiently. So if you do that, Patrick McKeown is a really good trainer, Brian McKenzie. This is what he does. I know Brian. He does this all day long. So I'm regurgitating so much of what I learned from him. Yeah. I'm imagining the high school student who's tuning into this, who is perhaps experiencing anxiety for the first time or the occasional flirtation with panic. Obviously, mental health concerns are on the rise with young people. And I want to make sure that I'm empowering young people with the tools that they need as early as possible to start to think about their well-being differently and provide them with practices. So what do you say to that young person who's completely unfamiliar with, you know, all of these kind of newfangled or oldfangled, I should say, you know, wellness practices to better self-regulate? I think if you're really dedicated and you really want to get a handle on it, you could explore Buteyko techniques. You can find someone to train you in this. That would be helpful. There's also resources online for free. and these specialize in training that CO2 tolerance to make it higher by just breathing slower and breathing lower. It sounds so simple. You're like, this isn't going to work. You'd be surprised. I was talking to Dr. Justin Feinstein for a number of years who studies anxiety and fear-based disorders, and he has done so many different studies looking at the breathing habits of asthmatics, of people with panic, people with anxiety. They're all the same. These are people that have no CO2 tolerance. They're constantly over-breathing. And his theory right now, I should call it a hypothesis right now, even though the data is really coming in, is that so many of these conditions are caused by this breathing, by this negative feedback loop constantly in the brain. So you get habituated to be over-breathing all the time. So your CO2 tolerance is very low. The moment you have to hold your breath, it sends off alarm bells to your brain. puts you into a panic attack, you start over-breathing more. That causes constriction in the throat, okay? You start breathing more, it causes that attack. That's the cause of the attack. This is what he is saying. So if that's what's causing it, how do you reverse it at the moment and how do you prevent it going forward? And the answer is to breathe more slowly. So if you feel a panic attack coming on, a device or I should say a technique, The only device you need is your nose here and in your brain, is to just take a calm inhale in, and then hold your breath for just a couple of seconds. Two, three seconds. Breathe in again. Breathe out and hold your breath for a couple of seconds. What this is doing is it's slowly, very gradually building that CO2 in your body to allow those blood vessels to open up, to relax everything. So that's one way of doing it. Another one that Patrick McEwen prefers is holding, if you are okay with looking a little weird, is holding your hands over your face and breathing in through your nose. Then you're inhaling your CO2. You're inhaling your CO2. Do that for a little while. They used to give people a paper bag, right? That used to be the go-to. They're saying, don't do that anymore. Just use your hands, right? It's available for you. So I have seen a lot of people benefit from breathing in that coherent pattern, that 5.5. Don't worry about the half second there. People are very worried that they're getting the half second. It's supposed to be five and a half seconds and five. Just estimate it, right? Just telling your body you're okay, you're safe, you're going to be breathing as though you were in a restful, peaceful position, right? And these signals then go to your brain to downregulate everything. Andrew Huberman prefers the two breaths in. I'd prefer three breaths in. I've heard that that works a lot better for people. It's a very simple exercise. You just inhale through your nose. Hold, inhale again. Hold, inhale again. And let it out. Through your mouth or nose, it doesn't matter. Do that about three or four times. And I think you can, just doing that one time, you can feel things calming down. Again, I don't like to give blanket prescriptions to anybody. I'm not a doctor. These are recommendations for you to play with. You find the one that works best for you, and you can start right there. That's for acute panic and anxiety. For long-term stuff, I think that Buteyko techniques have been shown to be very effective. It's interesting that part of the or one of the solutions to the stress and anxiety, the idea of developing your CO2 tolerance by like, you know, inhaling more CO2 is a bit of an exposure therapy on some level, right? Like let's stress, you know, your tolerance for CO2 so that you can become more resilient in future scenarios that are stress inducing for you. And it reminds me of, you know, this free diving thing, because one of the things they all talk about is when you try to hold your breath, obviously you reach that point where you're like, you can't take it anymore. It's so painful. And you just you just need air. But that is your you're actually you're actually fine. It's just your brain's defense mechanism. And the free divers train themselves to go past that point. And then things kind of open up for a while once they kind of mute that signal that's built in. That need to breathe is dictated by carbon dioxide, not by oxygen. So when you hold your breath, I'm going to feel this nagging need to breathe after 30 seconds, 45 seconds. That's from increasing CO2 levels. So that's exactly right. That's what freedivers do is their CO2 threshold is this high, right? The trick is with them, sometimes they can delude themselves. There's a reason why we're built with these evolutionary reflexes to want to breathe when we have these feelings. And the people that go overboard, I think, are being extremely careless. Listen to your body. Listen to your brain. Never practice any breath holding anywhere near water ever, ever. And Wim would tell you that as well. And it's the reason why when the freediver breaks the surface, their result is not official until they take a full inhale, right? Because a lot of them would just go and they would just float to the surface, passed out, and people die. When I was reporting on this, it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in Greece to watch these people just disappear, you know, 300, 350 feet down until they're just this little dot. The visibility is so amazing there. And then come back up. It's like, oh, my God, the human body is amazing, until they come up with blood all over their faces, and they're passed out, and one guy was dead for a few minutes. Why would you waste this gift that your body has given you to dive up and down a rope? I found it really careless, and competitive freedivers give me shit for this all the time. I mean, you can make the same argument for Alex Honnold free soloing El Capitan or the type A 101. Like, why would you risk your life for this thing? It's that drive for mastery or to, you know, go beyond what any other human being has ever been able to do that butts up against these, you know, essentially like healthy endeavors. But the freedivers, competitive freedivers I know that are still around and are happy people are the ones that always listen to their bodies. If they were feeling it, that they could go down and grab that little tag and come back up, they'd do it. If they weren't, they would never force themselves to do it. Sure, but if they're feeling great, they're always going to want to know where that line is. Maybe once in a while they have to go over it in order to know where it is. And the ones that go over it and come back then perhaps have a greater appreciation for respecting that line. Yeah, I don't care what people do. Like they can do whatever they want. And I think that's a beautiful thing. My problem with freediving culture is the only thing people tend to know about freediving is the competitive part. And what I found is this other part is so much more enriching and beautiful. The part that is an underwater yoga, it's an underwater meditation. it's something you train your body to do and you create this new feeling this new ability to be able to do something that's supposed to be impossible and yet it's an evolutionary switch that we flip on and to be able to do that and commune with whales and dolphins on their terms and their environment is one of the most powerful things i've i've ever done so if people want to compete that's completely fine that's perfect perfectly well but whenever i mention to people I'm a freediver, they say, oh, you're freaking crazy, man. You go down there, you're going to die. It needs some new branding around it. It should be called underwater base jumping, and it shouldn't be called freediving, or the freediving that I'm doing that has been done for thousands of years should be called something else, you know. Yeah, understood. Let's talk about piranha, back to the yogi stuff. Do you get shit for talking about this in the book? How so? Well, it depends. I get shit for everything. It depends. The yogis give me shit. The doctors give me shit. But whatever. I'm used to it now. It's a hard thing to merge ancient wisdom, even though you're not saying this ancient wisdom has been proven in randomized clinical trials. You're just saying this was a thing, and there's literature behind it, and people believe this and practice it. I want to know that back story. Some people don't. They just want to know the facts and figures. And then on the other end, some people don't want to know the facts of the years. They just want to know the mystical stuff. So I'm interested in both those things because I think together they form a richer story. They form the full view of what I'm trying to write about. So prana is essentially chi, right? So these are two things that were developed at different times and different cultures that, as far as we know, weren't communicating with one another. And it's life force. and they're both directly related to breath. In qi, we get qi from our breath, which is why there's so much breath work in qigong. What does qigong mean? It means breath work, energy work. And prana is central to yogic traditions. You're building prana in your body. The difference is in Hindu traditions, it is built on bringing this prana down here, the root chakra, up and out through the head to reach enlightenment. And Qigong, in ancient Chinese traditions, it is built around bringing it from out and around you, in from your head, down into your dantian. So one is about storing it. The other is about building it and letting it out. They have different purposes, different means. It depends on what you're looking for. You can go down the mystical rabbit hole on this, But it's undeniable if you even do a simple breath work practice for a couple minutes, it's undeniable that you feel a surge of energy, that there is, you know, a chi or a prana, that there is, you know, something ineffable about this that is connected to the breath. That's a good word to use, ineffable, because, you know, quote-unquote serious researchers would say, No, it's not. This is human biology. This is physics. You're getting this effect because your CO2 levels went down, then they went up, then you held your breath, and then the blood flowed to the brain, all of that. It's true. We can measure that. we haven't been able to find a way to objectively really measure chi and prana you know i have my personal beliefs and around those things but i try not to cloud the larger scientific story with those i've had a lot of really really powerful experiences doing breathwork stuff like unlike anything else i've ever experienced but telling people about those experiences is like hearing the dude next to you at a dinner party. Yeah. He's telling me about his dreams, man. And then, you know, I was flying. It's just boring. To me, it reeks of just some sort of quasi-self-importance. It doesn't do anything for the reader. What is the reader getting out of that? Sure. So here we are in the beginning of 2026. The book Breath came out in 2020. like right at COVID. You must have thought like, well, this is going to be a disaster. I mean, who could have predicted? I don't know how many millions of copies of this book you've sold, but it's been quite the sensation. But I do know that originally you had some ungodly number of pages that you had to cut down into a book size. So obviously a lot of what you originally imagined perhaps could end up in this book didn't end up in the book. Now here we are on the heels of the paperback version coming out, which you've made some updates. What are the changes in this newer edition of the book? What got left out of the massive manuscript that, you know, in a perfect world you would have liked to have included? I think I learned so much by talking with more experts. You know, you go out and research a book, you think you've got a pretty clear view of everything after you spend a few years really, really in the weeds researching it. But I didn't. I left out a bunch of things because I wasn't aware of them. And I learned these mostly at conferences, like the dentist, as I keep mentioning, or the airway guys, wellness conferences. Controversial, too, like the mewing and all of that. Yeah, yeah, and that's its whole other jam, right? How do you expand a mouth without using these different contraptions? Will the tongue be strong enough to do that in an adult? We know it is for a young kid, right? tongue posture is essential to have to be able to open up the mouth is a friend we don't know because there haven't been been enough studies but that's its its whole other thing but i was able to learn a bunch of new stuff and i approached the publisher i said i'd really like to put this in they of course weren't too keen on that idea but but i pushed and was was able to do it so there's around 20 25 new pages of stuff that was about the max that was allowed a new intro and And I was happy about that because I've been talking about these things in my talks, but people are like, why wasn't this in the book? Well, now it is, you know. Is there anything that you've changed your mind on since the book came out? I think the stuff around sleep disorder, breathing, I knew it was important before. I dedicated a few paragraphs to it. I'm realizing that I should have spent a lot more time on that, And especially talking about kids, because this is the number one email I get. And these are the people waiting at the bookstore, you know, who are both angry and happy and sad and frustrated that want to tell me about these things. So as far as the science, there wasn't much that I changed in this version because I spent, I knew that people were going to try to attack this. So I had a polynologist read it. I had it fact-checked a couple of times, you know. and I wanted to make sure it was as correct as I could get it. Did you ever imagine that you would be doing press and podcasts and giving talks and speaking about, when you wrote this book, like six years later, still to be this in-demand person and this book kind of hitting it out of the park? No. I mean, you know this, you release a book. Mine came out, what, six weeks into lockdown. great time to release a book, great time for touring, great time. You know, we weren't going to release it. We were going to wait a year. But the publisher, you know, we finally had a chat about it. They said maybe people need this now. So you don't expect any of this stuff. And, you know, six years on, answering these questions, still thinking about this stuff. I'm still in this world. I'm excited about it. At the same time, I've spent the last three years in another book, you know, that's hopefully going to come out next year, you know, early, early next year. So it's an interesting mental game to be going back to stuff that I was researching, writing about seven years ago, you know. And also, but the front of your brain is all about new stuff. It's fun, though. I mean, I have to say that there are times when I feel like I'm singing Margaritaville again, you know, with some of these fans. And I'm just like, this is what they want to hear. And here it goes. There are other times when, you know, I look at my inbox and there's literally 300 emails of people who are begging for help and they come to me. And I don't want that responsibility. I really thought, this is how deluded and ignorant I was, I really thought after speaking to all these medical schools, doing all these talks, talking to a lot of researchers, I thought things were going to be changing five years later, six years later. I don't see that happening at all. So I think the thing that people can do is they can now take charge of their own health. They have the resources. They have the ability. They need to find the time to do this in the right way. And I guess if there's any service I'm providing, it's that to be able to point them in the right direction. because I don't want these emails in my inbox. I don't want this line of people, you know, they're showing up with their eight-year-old kid and begging me to help them. I'm like, how the hell? I'm a journalist, man. Your doctor should be helping you with this. And it's just not happening. I don't know why that is. I mean, I have some thoughts, but until that happens, I feel like a strange semi-responsibility to keep talking about this stuff. Yeah, I think you're a cipher for a message that came at the right time and is resonating with people. We're seeing the rise of all of these physical and mental health issues. There's a reason for it, but I hear you. You're not like at Lourdes delivering the water. All these people, you're a cipher. You're like an avatar for this message for some reason. And it doesn't surprise me that the institutions and the halls of academia are a little bit slower. But like all change, it's from the ground up. And you certainly made a powerful cultural impact. I mean, it's like, you know, this is something that there is mainstream awareness around now that didn't exist before your book came out. And I think I'm also encouraged by the fact that it's a success story for the person who disappears for a number of years and goes really deep into something and comes back and delivers the goods. And this is becoming more and more difficult, less and less investigative journalists or even musicians being able to go away and create an album in the darkness and then return. This is not the culture or the economy that we exist in anymore. But this is also something that we desperately need because quality work takes time. And the fact that this book has been so successful is a testimony to the fact that there's an economic model for it as well as an appetite for it. I think that process of you have to love that process of disappearing. And you have to be able to afford it. You have to be able to be an economy to support that. That is absolutely true. And I was at the very end of my rope, which is, I'll be honest, one of the main reasons this book should come out. I need that check they give you when you finally deliver. Yeah, and that was the reality. I said, I need this. But that act of disappearance brings me so much peace and so much calm. It is getting harder and harder, especially as you get older, you have other responsibilities. there's other people that you need to be around, but it's essential to be able to come back out and feel like you've done justice to the story you're trying to tell. I know that this is a challenge for you, too. I mean, you run this whole business, you run this podcast. How do you find time to write a book? Yeah, I can't disappear. It's a balancing act to try to grab the time. I mean, when I wrote my first book, I had nothing going on. It's like nothing competing for my time, and now I'm in a very privileged position where that's not the case, but it does make it more difficult to find those immersive windows. Yeah, it does. I'm just trying to protect that time, and that's what I've done for the past few years. I really dropped out. There was a year I wasn't on social media at all. I didn't post a thing because I felt that that was necessary. and I think you have to instinctively be a bit of an introvert to enjoy that time. And I really enjoy that time. To be just like the idea of looking at my calendar on my phone and being like, oh my God, I have seven hours. It's the best. Nothing on the calendar. I immerse myself in this world where I'm controlling all the shots. I have four monitors set up and it's a world I control. And then you leave that, you leave your office, go outside, and I control nothing. And it's a hard thing to, a friend and I call this, it's the alpha world and it's the beta world. You know, the outside world is the beta world. And it's so hard to find the right balance between those things. But if you can't go into that alpha world to deliver your goods, you feel it in the writing that someone is rushing to get through something. which is why I'm taking so damn long to write this. This book is taking, this new one is taking a long time because I want that careful, slow, thoughtful time and I'm biting tooth and nail to find it every day. I want to leave people with some actionable, like daily takeaways. Like what can people start doing immediately in their home every single day to attune their attention to breathing better. First thing you're going to do, you're going to download an app. I have nothing to do with these apps. I don't get any money from them. They're free, Snore Lab, or there's one called Snore Clock, and you place your phone near your bedside, okay, and you just leave it there overnight. It can be in airplane mode, and it records you throughout the night. So many people say, I don't breathe through my mouth. I don't snore. I don't sleep apnea. This will help give you a general diagnosis of what is going on, of how you sound when you are breathing. And the majority of people who record themselves have found that they have issues with that. Once you have that diagnostic, that general diagnostic, you can either get an official sleep study or you can start messing around with different techniques to help make your breathing better at night so that you're not snoring. So if you have mild or even moderate sleep apnea, some of these techniques can work for you too. If you're extremely overweight, that's a structural problem, right? They're not going to do much for you. So get your breathing at night in control. I really think that I'm going to say that's the number one thing. Then you can start working on the daytime breathing at the same time. Nasal breathing, slow, low, deep. There are a bunch of different ways you can do that. I can tell you how I did it, but those are the general parameters. It's extremely simple, and this is why people think it's not going to work. There's a simple and easy way also to test your CO2 tolerance called the Bolt test. So if you think you're in good shape, maybe give this a whirl. Explain what that is. I'm going to use Brian McKenzie's test, which is even better, because people cheat with the Bolt test. Shut up, Brian. Learn this from him. What you're going to do, if you're not driving, don't do this driving. If you're sitting around, you can do it along with me. We're going to take three normal breaths. In through the nose. Out through the nose. No cheating. Normal breaths. In through the nose. Out through the nose. One more. In through the nose. Out through the nose. Now take the biggest breaths you've ever taken. All the way up. Keep going. Up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. At the very top of that breath. Now exhale through pursed lips as slowly as you possibly can. As slow. Don't hold your breath. You're exhaling through pursed lips as slowly as you possibly can. This does not make for good radio, people. I'm going to tell you what Rich is doing right now. He is at 85% of his capacity. He is edging towards 80. We're at 80. He's coming close to 75. We're nearing 70. So the point of this is to see how long you can be exhaling that breath. And at the very end of that breath, you're going to be timing yourself doing this, right? So you want to be at around a minute, 70 seconds, 80 seconds. Most athletes that Brian has tested, I hope I'm getting this right, Brian, max out around 30 or 40, which is still going. It's a very, but he's got this very serious, perverted look on his face. I can go a little bit longer, but like I was getting near the end. But that's it. Yeah. So your CO2 tolerance looks very good, right? A lot of people who do this, even very good athletes, max out around 30, 40. So you want to get up to around 60, 70, 80, if you can, up to 90 or even longer. You will be surprised as you train your breathing, as you get better at doing this, you're going to be surprised how quickly that increases, right? So that's a good general test that you can just do around the house. Don't do it near water. Don't do it driving. Use common sense. I like that all of this stuff is free. It's free. It's easy. It's available for everyone. You don't need any gizmos. There's a lot you can just do with your natural body that can help improve these things. Another thing I would do is to set that alarm on your phone four to ten times a day. When that alarm bell goes off, just take stock of how you're breathing. Are you breathing through your mouth? Are you breathing down low? Are you hunched over? This just sort of corrects you. And if you do that enough times, this is really beneficial for me. I set 30 alarms in a day just to really sort of lock it in. After a few weeks, I noticed that those habits were becoming unconscious. Meanwhile, chew more. The chewing thing's tough. If you're a kid, yes, chew more. Check out Baby Fed Weaning. Also, see a pediatric dentist. One of the smartest things you can do for a young kid ages 2 to 5, Go see a dentist with expertise in airway health. If you build a good foundation early enough, you don't need braces, right? The mouth is going to grow to be wide enough, and that's a great time to be doing it. For adults, there are benefits to chewing, but it's not going to do too much to the skeletal culture, right? It can do a lot for the back of the throat, for the flesh back there, for the tongue and more. but usually harder foods are going to be better for you especially if they're raw um you're doing god's work this is amazing stuff uh i've learned a lot man i i'm really thinking about all this very differently and hopefully the audiences as well so thank you for your service and coming here today thank you very much for having me appreciate it james peace that's it for today thank you for listening i truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive my books the finding ultra voicing change in the plant power way if you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or a comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com slash sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor. And of course, Our theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love. Love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. I love you. Thank you.