Why You Need To Relearn How To Breathe | James Nestor

Intro

so first of all you have to figure out where that that's occurring and then you have to consider that we have a muscle tube it's cartilage and muscle and tissues right here in our throats right we need to be working this out as well and by working out that too but you can expand it and you can actually reduce and sometimes reverse your sleep apnea okay so how do you work out that tube [Music] welcome to the michaela peterson podcast episode 116 with james nester the breathing expert do people really need to learn how to breathe apparently when i was really ill i felt like i couldn't inhale fully all the time but my diet fixed that there is more you can do though if you have trouble sleeping or sleep apnea this episode is for you we got majorly sidetracked down topics like freediving which was fun james is awesome i am most definitely trying freediving we spoke about the health care system sleep free diving some hippie stuff the usual i'm a huge fan of this guy this was a fun episode if you enjoy it please remember to hit subscribe also side note if you want to sponsor this show hit me up if you have awesome products that i like that is no vegan shakes i like meat and honey and air fryers and grills and salt and things i can sleep at on or sit on or maybe free diving equipment just kidding you don't need anything to free dive except your breath hit up sponsorships at michaelapedersen.com link below i hope you enjoyed this episode james nestor welcome to my podcast thanks a lot for having me before we get started would you mind giving my audience a brief background if they don't know who you are of who you are and what it is you do sure i'm a science journalist and an author and i write about health or i have been for the last few years and i'm interested in the potential of the human body that's what seems to be a through line through a lot of my work okay so i specifically wanted to speak with you because my dad's been diagnosed with sleep apnea rather severely he was waking up like maybe 30 times like a ridiculous amount he had no deep sleep and it was ruining his life one of the things that was so i thought let's get sleep apnea out of the way and then let's talk about other aspects of breathing but a lot of people suffer from sleep apnea and i know one of the ways to reduce the suffering is to lose weight but are there other ways to go about reducing sleep apnea and is cpap the right way to go so what are your thoughts on that so sleep apnea is this huge problem and it just seems to be getting worse and worse every year so about 20 of the population suffers from some level of sleep apnea which is crazy and a lot of people think that sleep apnea only afflicts obese people because what happens is too much fat accumulates around their necks and their airways get clogged and they start choking on themselves throughout the night but that's not true so many people who are average weight or even underweight ultra marathoners top fitness people can suffer from sleep apnea as well so sleep apnea is a problem in the airway and that problem can occur in various areas of the airway so for a lot of people it's the tongue falling back uh into the mouth sometimes it there's a problem with the oral pharynx nasopharynx that the deal is there is an obstruction there that has to be cleared and for so long people who had sleep apnea were often misdiagnosed and so they were giving given a whole you know battery of different pharmaceuticals which was actually making their sleeping worse if you don't do anything with your sleep apnea after several months or several years it can lead to so many chronic very serious problems diabetes has been linked directly with sleep apnea yeah who knew adhd alzheimer's all the rest so i'm not a doctor i can't prescribe a blanket fix for everyone with sleep apnea the most important thing is is to get it diagnosed figure out exactly where the problem is then you can fix it so okay that's that's interesting so i didn't realize that there were different that sleep apnea could be caused by different problems so yeah can you delve a bit more into that sure so you know people who are obese suffer from uh sleep apnea again because they have too much too much fat around their necks but the same thing happens with weight lifters you figure these people who are weight lifters are the fittest people on the planet but they die of heart issues all the time in their 40s and 50s because they have so many muscles around their necks and it inhibits their ability to breathe which is why so many people who are very fit have a lot of musculature around their necks have sleep apnea so first of all you have to figure out where that that's occurring and then you have to consider that we have a muscle tube it's cartilage and muscle and tissues right here in our throats right we need to be working this out as well and by working out that too but you can expand it and you can actually reduce and sometimes reverse your sleep apnea okay so how do you work out that tube mouth workouts yeah as as idiotic as that sounds i'm not going to demonstrate because it's it's gross but there's something called oral pharyngeal exercises that have been found in a few studies to be very effective in reducing sleep apnea surgery can be very beneficial as well and cpap is great as a band-aid right and it absolutely works it's been a lifesaver for so many people it's doing nothing for the core issue of sleep apnea to be pushing air into your body for a third of your life is not a good in my opinion a good long-term solution so there's there's so many different ways of treating this again i'm not going to be the one to tell people how to treat this but i will give you a few little hints from what i've heard from experts in the field from harvard from stanford and more is they prefer to start softly and see what your natural body can do for yourself and then you can lead up to a full diagnosis and and go into surgery or other methods to help fix that okay interesting so people potentially not that this is medical advice but potentially suffering from sleep apnea if they're using a cpap or something like that they could look into some of these mouth exercises and just see what it does for them if that ends up changing any of their symptoms they can do a few things they can do these oral pharyngeal exercises there is one instructure instructor that helps people uh improve their sleep apnea outcomes by singing and which is basically work out for your mouth that's cool and you get to sing if you're tone deaf that might be a problem for people around you but and there are also different things you can do with breathing in the daytime and this is a burgeoning area of research what they're finding is if you can control your breathing and breathe better in the day you can influence how you're breathing at night and this sounded sketchy when i first heard it a couple years ago tell i've more more recently heard from some top level researchers who are exploring this in some studies right now that makes sense that if you practice something during the day you strengthen those muscles and then slowly you teach your body to breathe a certain way at night that makes sense yeah and that's that's the thing with all these little hacks is there's not too much of a leap of logic to get there you're like okay my mouth is flabby uh just like other areas of my body are flabby what happens when i don't exercise them they get out of shape what happens when i exercise them they can get toned up what happens when i breathe in a slower lighter way in the day i'm gonna carry that habit into the night and and so to me it seems pretty simple and yet who's talking about this stuff i just don't see too many people except for for some leading researchers you know in in academic institutions okay so a flabby mouth how does one know whether or not they either have a floppy mouth or their breathing is is improper what are the signs yeah well that's that's tough uh if you're snoring then there is room for improvement and oftentimes not always but snoring and sleep apnea go hand in hand and a lot of us continue uh to believe that snoring is like this cute thing uh we think oh my you know my husband my wife snores i have to sleep in another room haha but but snoring is so injurious to the body if you're struggling to do anything for a third of your life struggling to get air right um it's it it can cause so many downstream problems and we've known this for for decades and decades and still you go on youtube and see pictures of like infants snoring and people think it's cute and it's you know talk to people in sleep medicine about how cute that is later on in their life when they have developmental problems so it's it's very serious stuff okay so back to weight lifters then you said that what they need to do is start focusing on also working out those muscles is it also reducing the amount of muscle they have around their neck though or no i i think it's less a concern about that and more concern about your airway health and the things that i'm suggesting now i want to be perfectly clear i'm not saying this is going to work for everyone all the time it's going to cure all your problems but this stuff is free you will only be celebrating in benefits of having better breathing right and having better airway health you can only benefit from this so so why not look into it so those exercises they're having weight lifters do and and skinny people and ultra marathoners do are you're using this very powerful muscle which is your tongue and you're learning how to use the tongue the way our ancestors use their tongue in in the fact that they used to push their tongues to the roof of your of the mouth when you're swallowing right and we know this because our ancestors all had these pronatic faces right they all had straight teeth because they had these wide mouths they got those wide mouths by having this correct oral posture so so it starts with that oral posture don't walk around with your mouth open when you swallow move the tongue to the roof of the mouth to push it don't push against your teeth right and if you want you can do some of these oral pharyngeal exercises which are a whole bunch of crazy stuff opening your mouth lifting the tongue to the top of the mouth sticking the tongue out so on and so forth what does any of this have anything to do with mewing have you heard of mewing so mewing is just uh that's just a version of an oral pharyngeal exercise there's really no difference between it and what what john and mike have done is they've tried to bring awareness to the fact that our oral posture is so poor and if you have poor oral posture when you're young it can affect the growth of your face it can actually affect how you're breathing later on in life because as the face develops right it needs the right inputs about 40 to 50 percent of how you look of how your airways are going to form are epigenetic which means they're going to be formed by whatever inputs you put into them it's it's not just encoded in your genes right it's it's the environment that is influencing how you're going to look and how you're going to be able to breathe and so what they were trying to bring awareness to was to shut your mouth for one don't walk around like this you see a kid walking around like this that's bad news right shut your mouth the teeth should almost be touching and the tongue should be on the roof of the mouth with the very tip just grazing the back of your front teeth so a lot of us even when we're shutting our mouths our tongues are still down low tongue should be raised up and you're gonna notice when you open your mouth the tongue tends to rock back into the throat right that it helps to to close the airway when you close your mouth that tongue will rock up and will help open the airway this is especially important at night when you've got gravity working against you just shut your mouth and become a nasal breather okay very aware of my tongue at the moment it doesn't make for a very good radio does it to just be sitting there with your with your mouth closed working on these exercises but listeners you can try this at home and see how it works for you yeah i've got i've got a bit of a horror story i'm so horrified by this i have a four-year-old and they put warnings on soothers right it's like don't use this past six months and i was young and she liked her soother so i was like she likes the soother anyway she's about a year she's past a year and she still had this soother and my mom was like you're screwing up her teeth i was like i'm not screwing up her teeth and and but then i started looking into it and i was googling and it was just hundreds of pictures of these toddlers with teeth that have grown like around a soother and then they end up with their lower jaw that's too far back and it's and it destroys how attractive they are which is a huge problem when you grow up they end up with a whole bunch of teeth problems like jaw surgery if it's really bad so obviously we stopped the soother and but it took her teeth maybe almost two years to go back to normal it was horrifying i was very unhappy that they don't have these huge warnings on soothers like we'll disfigure for life if you use these too long but does soother use or sucking your thumb when you're little does that screw up breathing as well of course it does yeah for sure and you know there's a lot of research i'm not an expert in this field about baby-led weaning about not using this non-nutritive uh suckers um or pacifiers you know a lot of people were saying i was just hanging out with dr kevin boyd last week who was the expert in this field and he's saying like anything over six months for with a pacifier is bad news he even says any pacifiers are are bad news because what what happens is when an infant is is breastfeeding and and breastfeeding every two hours or how however often it helps to literally pull the face outward okay when you're pulling the face outward the palate will become will be able to sink down and open up and so you not only have this more attractive pronatic profile but you have more room in the mouth for teeth to grow in straight so you're setting up the foundation for straight teeth and also a wider airway what happens when you have a wider larger mouth you have a wider airway there's more room in there and so one of the reasons why so many of us suffer from snoring and sleep apnea is our mouths have grown too small and because they're too small there's not enough room for our tongues and so we're literally choking on ourselves every night because of this and and it this sounds crazy but all you have to do is look back at ancient skulls this is something i did for a couple of years worked with with some top researchers they all had stray teeth they all had pronatic profiles right they had these wide nasal apertures they breathed totally different than we do today it's amazing how many ways you can screw up just being alive like oops pacifier it's like under a year and a half and your face is screwed up now well you know the good thing is that's reversible you're aware of it now and there's so many procedures you can do expansion procedures correct oral posture all of these things can make an incredible difference to the profile to the breathing health of your kid it's about establishing positive habits now as you know when we're in early development it's much easier to change these screw-ups when you get to middle age right it's a lot harder because things are more set that doesn't mean we can't make a lot of improvements and i showed that in in my book you know two-year airway health to your breathing to your health um obviously we can but it's a lot easier when you're younger okay but when you're middle-aged you can still do you think doing those these facial exercises not for everybody but for some people or losing weight doing the facial exercise and strengthening can reverse sleep apnea for some people for some people uh yes it can and and i know this because i've seen it because i've this is the one thing i've heard more from from anybody else um or people with snoring and sleep apnea who have written have adopted these quick little fixes who use a little bit of sleep tape at night and no longer snore no longer have sleep apnea doesn't work for everybody but it's worked for according to these people thousands and thousands of people and now there's a study booting up at stanford with 200 people looking at nasal breathing and sleep apnea on how just nasal breathing changing the pathway through which we breathe at night can significantly improve our sleep and reduce sleep apnea interesting i always had a i had a number of health problems and i always had trouble i used to snore i don't anymore but i used to snore but it's because i couldn't breathe through my nose at night it felt like i couldn't breathe through my nose and then i fixed my diet now i can breathe through my nose and so now i don't snore anymore but sleep tape always horrified me a little bit when my nose was stuffy because i was like i remember thinking if i ever get kidnapped and they duct tape my mouth i'm gonna die because i can't breathe through my nose very well so do do people who have trouble breathing through their nose are they able to do the sleep tape does that improve do you think it does improve it but it again it depends what's what's your problem what is causing this nasal congestion right is it a structural issue have you broken your nose four times your septum so so deviated you can't move through your nose or is it an allergic reaction to food to something in the environment to something in the air um you know so each of these things has to be looked at and you need to find the core issue that's that's causing the problem in order to really fix it so as you found and so many other people have found changing your diet can significantly impact your ability to breathe through your nose especially removing dairy especially us dairy a1 protein dairy can make a huge difference um for other people it's it's about finding what else is causing that allergic reaction right is it pollen um so so you have to look into that but the key is here that if you are a mouth breather i'm more convinced of this now than ever and i'd heard this from researchers years ago if you're a mouth beer there you are never ever really going to be healthy no matter what you do no matter what exercise you do no matter what foods you eat you have to become a habitual nasal breather this is the route through which the body wants to receive air because when we breathe air through the nose it's filtered it's pressure pressurized it's humidified it's conditioned when we breathe air through the mouth you can think about the lungs as an external organ they're exposed to everything in the environment if you're breathing 20 25 000 times a day you're gonna really cause a lot of problems and you're gonna overwork your body unnecessarily okay that makes sense yeah especially air filtering that makes sense you don't have to fight off infections without that kind of mucous membrane protection yeah that makes sense uh okay what's a proper breath look like like if you're describing to the audience exactly how you should be breathing you talked a little bit about where your tongue should be but is there a length of time you're supposed to breathe in versus out like what does a normal breath assuming you're not exercising look like it depends who you are and it depends on what you're doing so the perfect breath is the breath that is most efficient to your metabolic needs you don't want to be over breathing for your metabolic needs you don't want to be under breathing so kids need to breathe more than adults when you're jogging or running you're gonna be breathing more than you're breathing on a sofa right it's easier said than done to say just breathe within your metabolic needs but one thing the nose is so good at is it helps control the flow of air into our bodies and it does this for us in many capacities it's really hard to hyperventilate through the nose it's really easy to hyperventilate through the mouth which is why you see people with anxiety fear-based disorders panic asthma they tend to breathe like this yeah try to do that through your nose it's a lot harder so when you breathe through the nose you're forcing your body to breathe more slowly to breathe more deeply and breathe more lightly and those slower fluid breaths allow us to get more oxygen with fewer breaths and so that's what efficiency is all about if you're into athletic performance it's all about efficiency right so many of us don't think about this that we think it's okay just to be breathing up to our into our upper chest just all day but that's just like revving a a car and idling just over and over and over you're working your body you're working all these different functions but you're getting a minimal amount of breath so one good thing that i one good breath that i learned four people at rest okay this isn't gonna work if you're boxing is to take in a breath of about five to six seconds in and five to six seconds out so when you breathe this way that you shouldn't push it okay a lot of westerners tend to just that seems like such a long time well this is an exercise uh you're not going to be able to do this throughout the day if you can my understanding is you're only going to have benefits from it but this is an exercise to condition yourself to slow it down and it turns out that when you breathe this way so many different systems of the body enter into a state called coherence your brain waves enter the state of coherence your cardiorespiratory system enters the state of coherence heart rate goes down blood pressure goes down more oxygen is delivered to the brain more areas of the brain come online are able to communicate more fluidly just by breathing this way if you have a wearable that can look at heart rate variability everyone's into that stuff nowadays check out what happens to your heart rate variability when you breathe in this pattern of about five to six seconds in five to six seconds out five to six seconds in and five to six seconds out so this this is not a placebo effect and you can see it with very clear objective measurements from instruments and so this is a great place to start uh there's only benefits from breathing this way if some people get panicked when they're breathing this way and can't do it just slow it down you know do do four seconds in and four seconds out and you should think of this breathing like like a circle don't think of it like ah that's good for pranayama martial arts stuff but this calm breathing should be very relaxing to you and you can use this anytime you want to calm yourself and the science is very clear that it has pretty profound benefits oh that's that seems fairly simple five to six seconds in five to six second notes how do you feel about something like wim hof breathing i love wim hof breathing i think wim is an amazing dude i think he has brought awareness to the potential of breathing what it can do for autoimmune issues what it can do for anxiety what it can do for fitness freaks and bros and women and whomever else more than anyone and i i'm lucky enough to have spoken with him several times and i'm a huge fan of of what he's doing it seems so counterintuitive that he's up on a stage right saying breathe everybody let's go and i just told you that the most benefits are going to be from this very slow breathing but it depends on what you want your breath to do for you wim hof's method which is an ancient method and he's the first to admit that is like going to the gym you're not going to spend 24 hours in the gym right you go in for a very closed amount of time you work your body out get jacked up and then you feel better for the rest of the day so his method teaches you how to turn on stress that's what it's doing you're stressing yourself out you probably think why do i want to stress myself out you want to do that so that you can learn how to turn it off you compound all your day's stress in 20 minutes and then the rest of the day you can chill out and that's why his method is so effective what people don't see about whim is when he's not up on stage you know shirtless yelling at people to breathe more he's chilling out breathing through his nose breathing very lightly and softly but but that's not uh you know it's not as sexy as seeing a dude on stage in front of an audience doing that so what i'm saying is breathing you can do it in all of these different ways and there are there are benefits to be had from so many of them interesting i found with wim hof i used to do a lot of you know head space or meditation just trying to calm my brain down and i found that that i've never experienced anything as effective as his breathing if you do like three rounds of 30 of those really intense breaths it's very unpleasant i find but the after effect is just insane like i had no idea that breath could make that much of a difference to mental health or just your sense of calm it makes sense but still that that method of breathing very heavy and then holding your breath and then breathing very heavy again this has been around for thousands of years there's so many pranayamas that do this sudarshan kriya does the exact same thing kundalini breathwork does the exact same thing and it's no coincidence that all of these different techniques affect us in the same way they're so effective for anxiety and panic there's a hundred independent studies looking at sudarshan cree and how effective it is even for autoimmune diseases when people are constantly stressed out you know there's this iv drip of adrenaline and cortisol you have to stop that and by breathing this way as as you know and as i know it allows you to sort of get it all out and then just be so relaxed through the rest of the day what what i love about this stuff too is it's free you know and there are no negative side effects to to breathing so it's accessible to everybody and and i think that that's that makes it so uh it makes it so universal which is why the hindus were into this and the ancient chinese were into it and we're into it today good so your book took off right like you i've seen you on a ton of different podcasts people seem to be really interested in this do you have any idea why your book's been so successful that's a good question i have no idea when you when you write books you know you put them out into the world and you think maybe your mom and friends are going to read them and that might be it it's a scary thing because you have no idea what's going to happen i certainly had no idea what was gonna happen with this book you know i when i first mentioned the idea to my agent and editor they thought it was the stupidest book idea they'd ever heard so i had to work on it more i said i think there's something in here they didn't believe these stories that you could help fix scoliosis with breathing that you could help fix asthma with breathing that you could fix panic with breathing um that diabetes could be uh symptoms of diabetes could be reduced with breathing they didn't believe this and and i didn't believe it uh either until i really spent a long time years talking with researchers and putting together the stories so i was unfortunate enough to have spent so many years working on this book and it was all printed and ready to come out in may of 2020 and as you know books books are printed like five months ahead of time right so it's in the warehouse ready to go it was already released in catalogs i was ready to tour march comes around of 2020 i was like oh my god so i had to record the audiobook in in a shed in my backyard because everything was shut down here in san francisco we weren't going to release the book we were going to wait a year a year and a half and then an editor said you know what people might need this right now we have a respiratory pandemic and uh i said what the hell i'll just i'll do promo the next year we'll just get it out and uh yeah it's been a complete trip you know the last year and in a couple of months have have been pretty nutty uh i didn't know that so many people were as interested in this seemingly simple and and odd thing as breathing as as as i've seen but obviously it's awesome i'm so grateful i guess that makes sense given the pandemic have you done any research on how breathing can affect and covet or viral issues it can have a huge impact on it and this isn't from my experience this is coming from doctors in the field there's a whole group of doctors called stasis right now they put together breathing protocols for covid so one of the first things they started doing with covid patients is instead of having them on their backs right in hospitals most of the expansion in your lungs happens in your back it doesn't happen in your chest everyone thinks it's here oh wow when you breathe it's happening in your back so if you're on your back it's much harder to even take a breath in right and we've known this for hundreds and hundreds of years and yet in hospitals they're laying out these coveted patients on their backs so the first thing they did is started to prone them they would lay them on their stomachs or their sides and it made a huge difference then they started noticing that so many people suffering from severe covet had breathing problems they were mouth breathing they were breathing too much they were constantly hyperventilating so they started fixing that then they started engaging the rest of their lungs right this is a viral problem in the lungs and it seeps into all of the different lung tissues and clogs them up right what you want to do is to be engaging the other parts of the lungs that aren't clogged up with fluid and to be breathing more fluidly to be breathing very softly and lightly into the lungs so this can make a huge difference and i was pretty amazed that i was finding this and researchers were writing me right when the book came out and said try to get this information out there and yet i just don't see the cdc or anyone else talking about nutrition vitamin d levels breathing health you know when it comes to covid treatment and i think they should and at least from what i've heard from several doctors that should have been a part of the program uh right from the get-go yeah it most certainly should have but i don't know why maybe it's harder i think the medical community is so used to looking into pharmaceutical interventions that it's just a little bit outside of their forte maybe i don't know yeah it should have obviously been covered it is outside of their forte because they're dealing with acute severe problems you know in my family there are doctors my father-in-law is a pulmonologist so the specialist of the lungs and so much of what i was finding he had never heard of in his life and and you know he was curious as to why that was but he's dealing with people who come in with lung disease who come in get in a car accident who have copd right he's not dealing with people who have chronic low-grade problems a lot of doctors say we only deal with the walking dead you have to get so bad just like with sleep apnea you can have five apnea events six acne events per hour and you still won't get any treatment from sleep apnea it has to get so bad before you get treatment for it and i just think that that is a twisted way of looking at human health like maybe we should be looking into prevention and what we can do to avoid these long-term problems yeah i entirely agree but the problem there is there's so many aspects nowadays that are wrong aspects of our lives that are just wrong like you have to you have to attack it in such a multifaceted way that it's hard to say you know fix this one part when when for for people to be healthy they need to fix you know nutrition and sleep and exercise and breathing and how your mouth is developed and breastfeeding it's a lot to handle just to keep somebody healthy it it is but as we've been discussing here these fixes are so like well of course oh it's so simple right that they're not very convoluted and the way i look at this stuff because diet is more confusing now than it's ever been it doesn't need to be that confusing it's the further we move away from nature the sicker we get if you look at any culture if you look at at westerners 300 years ago the advent of the industrial revolution right this is when all of these chronic diseases first started taking root so when we start moving away from nature and it's no coincidence that if you look at the hunter-gatherer tribes that are still around they don't have hypertension they don't have diabetes they don't have asthma they don't have allergies they don't have any of these the vast majority of these problems that we have and yet their diets are some of them eat the majority of carbs that's what their diet is 90 carbs others eat almost entirely fat and meat and cow's blood but they still don't have any of these problems so to me i start seeing these patterns the further we move away from that the sicker we get what happens when we start moving back towards nature and doing things our bodies were evolved to do oh that's weird our bodies start getting well again and this is this is how i view a lot of of medicine is moving in this direction because it's been so effective for people who haven't been helped in any other way i hope so i think that from my experience from get being chronically ill to healing was like i didn't stop i mean i still haven't stopped talking about it and i didn't stop talking about it for a number of years to everyone i met because i was so mind blown that i had control over some of my health problems so i think everybody who clues into one of these kind of alternative health practices isn't even the right way of of talking about it because it's more like traditional right but i think the more people that clue into it the more it'll spread and with social media and podcasting and everything it seems to be going in a positive direction i hope and hopefully that'll influence mainstream medicine at some point yeah i hope but but it's also it's so strange to me that you've got all these dudes in the gym now talking about the electron transport chain and atp and they become default biochemists you had to do your own research right you're like nothing's working for me i need to do my own research here i had the same exact experience with breathing i said why do i have all these respiratory problems my doctor and other people are like oh you're old dude get get used to it and i was like yeah but you can see these older people who don't have any of these respiratory problems so so something's wrong it's just all of us have been forced to become these hackers in such a way where we have to research our own core problem because no one else is doing it but in some ways that's it's enlightening that so many of us now have access to information to take control of our health you know and i don't think that this information was disseminated before you know it was much harder to get this 10 years ago 20 years ago now we have podcasts and other routes of finding information and you can try this stuff out and see what works for you yeah that's the nice thing about it just listen to people try it out see see what works so you said i wanted to ask you and i forgot to ask you uh closer to the beginning of the episode why did you get into this in the first place uh i had some breathing issues but i'm a science journalist so i didn't want to write a memoir about that that's that's not my jam and so i just sort of stuck with those and i was curious as to why i was having them i surfed a lot here in san francisco i was also doing a lot of martial arts at the time and i kept getting bronchitis and i kept getting mild ammonia like every single year it would get pneumonia i noticed i was starting to weasel it a little bit when i was working out um you know my doctor's office they gave me a bronchodilator and said uh just use this when you're wheezing i was like well what's the core problem they're like i don't know you know just and i said well that's weird i want to research this a bit so i stuck with that and i tried to figure it out for a couple of years i went to a breathing class which i was told could help improve my lung function and instead i had just this absolutely crazy reaction from doing this very vigorous breathing it's just like wim hof breathing but it's like 50 minutes long of really going for it yeah yeah and i just started sweating just pouring sweating profusely my my hair was like sopping wet i sweat through my t-shirt and i went back to my friends who are in medicine i said what what happened they said oh you had a fever oh the room was too hot oh you were wearing too many clothes i said no no those things were true but still i didn't know what to do with that story so i put that in the back file and kept researching breathing and then was put on an assignment to write about free divers for outside magazines this was years and years ago and i saw them and they just opened everything up they were doing something that's supposed to be medically scientifically impossible and they're doing it every day so if they can do that what else can we doing could we be doing and what else can i learn about where breathing can take us that totally makes sense so besides stepping into free diving do they do some do they prepare similar to wim hof i know that if i do wim hof breathing for about 10 minutes like the the cycles of 30 breaths i can hold my breath no problem for like three and a half or four minutes which you shouldn't be able to do and i can most definitely do and it didn't take a lot of practice to be able to get there so do they do something like that in order to be able to free drive how does that work it's very controversial stuff here so some people do but the reason you're able to hold your breaths for so long after you hyperventilate like that is you're offloading a ton of co2 from your body right and by offloading that co2 you are allowing your chemoreceptors to to reset and have more time before they trigger the need to breathe this gets a little complicated i'll simplify it so the need to breathe is not triggered by oxygen it's triggered by an increase of co2 so if you exhale and hold your breath and then you're like i need to breathe that's triggered by an increase of co2 if you're breathing very slowly and hold your breath you're gonna have a healthy balance of co2 which means that limit right that difference be between that need to breathe is going to be smaller if you offload more co2 you have more space there before those those alerts go off so this can get dangerous because co2 and oxygen are very closely tied together that need to breathe when that co2 gets to a certain level is usually the time when your body needs oxygen so if you're hyperventilating before you're diving you can pass out because you can run out of oxygen before that trigger of co2 hits those chemoreceptors oh that's not what i wanted to hear at all i'm sorry yeah so don't ever do wim hof in a bathtub don't ever do it before you go into a pool people have died doing this that is do it on your sofa you know do it on land so with free diving what you really want to train yourself to do is to naturally be able to accept that increase of co2 and that you can breathe slowly most all of the freedivers are met they breathe very slow before they dive they'll breathe a big breath but it'll be a slow and calm breath to calm themselves down it's a lot harder to hold your breath that way at the beginning but this is the better way of free diving wow i had no idea i'm also glad you told me about the bathtub because i can see that's a way i could have gone gone out like well i can hold my breath forever don't don't if you're if you're even if you're hyperventilating and holding your breath for four minutes you'd be a good free diver because you've a mat you've enabled your body to become comfortable with that long breath hold and i i can tell you like free diving is the most transcendent meditative thing you can do have you done that all the time yeah really favorite thing so a lot of people view freediving you you go on youtube and you see guillermo neary uh diving down to 300 feet right or with sperm whales and so he's an elite diver this is uh it's kind of sad my first book deep there was some free diving in it that looked at the human uh body and our connection to the ocean from the very surface of the of the ocean to the very bottom of the deepest sea right so there's freediving up in the more shallow levels but a lot of people know freediving through its competitions where these people are challenging one one another to see how deep they can dive and come back to the surface conscious yeah what could go wrong well i i saw what could go wrong and that's that's in the outside magazine article but free diving that's that's not what it was originally intended to be and that's not what the vast majority of the people on the planet use it for they use it as this connection with the ocean with yourself it's totally silent down there you're in zero g's you're floating around animals come up to you because you're silent they accept you as part of their you know the ocean environment so it's just such a trippy and amazing thing and uh it's been hard being locked here in san francisco but i'm traveling very soon and i hope to be doing a lot of diving in the future that sounds amazing i haven't done very much looking into that gave me goosebumps that story that sounds that sounds amazing where are you planning on going are you gonna go somewhere and and do the free diving i'm going to europe for a couple of months so they have free diving pools in italy and in france i've been to the one in paris where instead of the pools being like wide and shallow they're very narrow and deep so you can practice there they go down to about 60 i think the one in italy goes down to 100 feet so you can practice your free diving in this controlled environment because free diving is a huge deal in europe not just the competitive side but people do this because they're you know it's it's the easiest way to really connect with yourself and to force yourself into a meditative state you can't do it if you're anxious or panicky or hyperventilating you have to chill the hell down and to focus and just sort of let your body go and uh you will never feel better than you have after four or five hours of free diving in the ocean because not only are you experiencing that you're breathing in this very fluid controlled way okay i'm sold how long can you i'm definitely going to do that how long can you go for how long do you hold your breath for you're asking me these very clear questions i realize i'm giving you the most convoluted answers but uh there's a reason i'm doing that so freedivers told me don't pay attention to your watch the reason is your body changes from day to day so you could be feeling really good and stay down to three to four minutes or some days you're a little stressed out you ate the wrong foods and your body is telling you to go up to the surface after two minutes so we are so inherently competitive western ours westerners are that that we just want to be looking at oh i made it you know three minutes yesterday i'm gonna try to go four listen to your body like leave that crap behind and when you feel the need to breathe here's an idea go up to the surface and get a breath this is not a competition this is about enjoying yourself and connecting with your body so having said that other people have have timed me and i've done very shallow um you know dives for about three minutes three or four minutes that's not moving a lot right that's just sort of sitting sitting down and the more you move the more oxygen you're using so but even a minute underwater and even diving down to 60 or 70 feet at around 30 feet buoyancy shifts and you no longer get pulled to the surface you get gently tugged to the deep that's creepy and you it's not it's it's when you first do it you're like whoa because you're you're just like a feather floating down but you can just sit there unmoving and float down and just glide down so just staying down for a minute is a transformational experience and feeling that negative buoyancy that gravity-less state it's just incredible so i hope i'm i'm really selling this big time to people to do this in a responsible way don't practice this crap in your bathtub get a proper teacher and do it the right way and uh i think it's a really beautiful hobby to do cool okay well i'm i'm definitely interested in that uh i guess to practice then you'd want to stay more shallow so you could get used to the breathing slowly sounds scary if you're floating down and then you also like suddenly realize you need a breath and then it's harder to get back up because the buoyancy's you have to think of it like climbing a mountain right you don't climb a mountain and think as you're going up i'm going to use 100 of my energy you have to use about 40 of your energy you know 50 and say i always need to have something in the tank so with a proper free diving instructor you're gonna go down to seven feet okay you're gonna get comfortable with seven feet then you're gonna go back up then after a while you're gonna go down to 10 feet and then 15 feet and then 20 feet so you will know your halfway limit that's what free diving is all about just like so many other things you you will feel that your body tells you all of these messages because we are meant to be in the water deep diving humans have something called a mammalian dive reflex it's the same reflexes that dolphins and whales and seals have we have them too and the deeper you go the less of a terrestrial animal you become because more of these reflexes kick in your spleen releases oxygenated blood into your bloodstream and and blood comes into your core and your mind enters this meditative state some free divers have recorded their heart rates at seven beats per minute during deep dives and this is the body learning that you're relearning becoming reacquainted with these ancient skills that we're all born with and when they start turning on it's gonna freak you out but it also feels incredible because you feel like you're really connecting with with our our true nature again that is so cool seven beats per minute what isn't it versus like 90 something what do we normally add well it depends at rest a lot of people can be in their 60s uh some athletes can get into their 50s and 40s right now we're talking we're active we're probably in our in our 70s or 80s so so this is not supposed to be humanly possible and they've read they've looked at their blood oxygen levels and found that they were at 50 percent 5-0 what is considered unhealthy is below 92. so uh this was a recent study too and they've been studying this for decades but a study came out a couple months ago showing this again shouldn't be possible if you told someone this was possible and and hadn't done the study they they would call you insane and yet this is the stuff that that i love it's like if we don't know this about our bodies if we're just discovering this what what else is out there what else can we do with them i completely agree that's kind of how i feel i've been on only eating meat since december 2017 for autoimmune issues again completely mind blowing like how is that possible didn't think that was possible i like this free diving thing so people are basically we still have those old mammalian instincts but we just forgot about them yeah we're all born with them um and what we do is just reawaken them when we enter the water and you can you don't have to free dive to do this the reason why if you go into your kitchen or your bathroom right now and splash cool water on your face your heart rate can go down about 20 percent just by doing this because that triggers these nerves in your face to send messages to your body to calm down so those messages increase the deeper and deeper you go when your body senses pressure when it senses your whole body is in water it calms us down and this calming us down allows us to conserve more oxygen this is why a whale can stay under water for 90 minutes why seal can stay underwater for two hours they're accessing these mammalian dive reflexes they also have different hemoglobin profiles but but we have these things too we're mammals you know um and we're just like seals and just like dolphins and just like whales in this regard which is why when you free dive these animals if you're lucky enough to have them around they accept you as is one of their own and they they come up to you and they interact with you i've had these these interactions and it's just the most incredible experience you could have because with scuba you're pretty loud right you look like and you look terrifying you look terrifying and they associate dolphins at least associate bubbles with signs of aggression that's what they do yeah when they're being aggressive but if you come up and they see you go up to the surface grab a breath of air just like they do and then you come back down and then they start mimicking you in what you're doing and it's a beautiful thing people i know this sounds like some new age dream but but go and do it and you'll see for yourself this is exactly right down my alley that sounds perfect okay that was awesome uh where can people find you online if they want to learn more about breathing and breath work and apparently free diving so my website my publisher allowed me to to put all of the scientific references there's something like 400 scientific studies because i realized all of this sounds just like complete sketchiness and uh but it's all real uh so you can see that at mr mrjamesnester.com backslash breath to go right to that portal there are videos up there there are interviews with professors at harvard and other leaders in the field talking about breathing there are also exercises all of that is is free for people um the larger stu story is in the book of course i'm trying to get better at this instagram thing pretty bad at it but i'm just posting stuff associated with the stuff i'm working on uh breathing and other elements of human potential cool that was amazing i'm gonna get my dad into these mouth exercises he's like he's he's already on a diet he's like what more what more is there michaela like haha mouth exercises now dad is he is he uh sleep taping by any chance he was i don't think he is anymore he had an autoimmune flare-up and that is under control again now so he's back into all the things to make himself feel better and i think focusing on the sleep apnea right now would be good which is part of the reason i invited you on so thank you for all that incredibly valuable information more than happy to help thanks a lot thanks a lot for having [Music] you

How to reduce sleep apnea.

The different effects of sleep apnea.

Working the tube in the throat.

How to spot proper breathing.

Oropharyngeal exercises.

Mikhaila’s experience with soothers and the problem with pacifiers.

Does sleep tape help?

What a proper breath looks like.

The breathing of Wim Hof.

Nestor’s book popularity.

Our twisted healthcare system and the effects on COVID19.

How James started.

Freediving.

James's experience in freediving.

The practice of freediving.

Wrap up