The Breath of Life — A Summary of “Breath” by James Nestor
Frequently, I voice concerns over the scarcity of investing education, yet there exists a topic of even greater criticality, one that profoundly impacts our very existence. It’s the art of breathing — an essential function so vital, yet astonishingly, we receive little to no formal instruction on how to execute it correctly. This oversight eclipses the need for even water or food, touching on the elemental necessity of oxygen, or rather, as James Nestor enlightens us in his revelatory book, “Breath” the underestimated value of carbon dioxide. Breathing isn’t merely a biological function; it embodies the essence of life itself. Given its paramount importance, it’s only fitting that we delve deeper into the mechanics of breathing, far beyond our current understanding.
Join me as I navigate through the insights and discoveries presented in “Breath,” a book that not only captivated my interest but also transformed my perspective on what it means to truly breathe.
We humans are the worst breathers in the Animal Kingdom: “40% of today’s population suffers from chronic nasal obstruction, and around half of us are habitual mouthbreathers, with females and children suffering the most. The causes are many: from dry air to stress, inflammation to allergies, pollution to pharmaceuticals. But much of the blame, I’ll soon learn, can be placed on the ever-shrinking real estate in the front of the human skull.”
As you can see, evolution doesn’t always mean progress; it means just change. And in this case “we’re adopting and passing down traits that are detrimental to our health. This concept, called dysevolution, was made popular by Harvard biologist Daniel Lieberman, and it explains why our backs ache, feet hurt, and bones are growing more brittle. Dysevolution also helps explain why we’re breathing so poorly”
Don’t breathe through your mouth, not even when exercising: “Simply training yourself to breathe through your nose, Douillard reported, could cut total exertion in half and offer huge gains in endurance. The athletes felt invigorated while nasal breathing rather than exhausted”
Aerobic Vs Anaerobic: “The ways the body makes energy from air and food. There are two options:
With oxygen, a process known as aerobic respiration.
Without oxygen, which is called anaerobic respiration. Anaerobic energy is generated only with glucose, and it’s quicker and easier for our bodies to access. It’s a kind of backup system and turbo boost when the body doesn’t have enough oxygen. But anaerobic energy is inefficient and can be toxic, creating an excess of lactic acid”
“Essentially, anaerobic energy is like a muscle car — it’s fast and responsive for quick trips, but polluting and impractical for long hauls. This is why aerobic respiration is so important. Remember those cells that evolved to eat oxygen 2.5 billion years ago and kicked off an explosion of life? We’ve got some 37 trillion of them in our bodies. When we run our cells aerobically with oxygen, we gain some 16 times more energy efficiency over anaerobic. The key for exercise, and for the rest of life, is to stay in that energy-efficient, clean-burning, oxygen-eating aerobic zone for the vast majority of time during exercise and AT ALL TIMES DURING REST”
So what should we do?. Inhale through the nose: “It forces air against all those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and breathing easier. After a while, these tissues and muscles get “toned” to stay in this opened and wide position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal breathing.”. The more you do it, the better you’re at doing it and the more you’ll do it in a virtuous cycle.
What happens when we breathe through the mouth and we get sleep apnea? (When oxygen falls)?: “Whenever oxygen falls below 90 percent, the blood can’t carry enough of it to support body tissues. If this goes on too long, it can lead to heart failure, depression, memory problems, and early death” Yes, it’s serious stuff.
So, avoid sleep apnea and snoring: “No amount of snoring is normal, and no amount of sleep apnea comes without risks of serious health effects”
And the cause is mostly not knowing how to properly breathe through the nose: “Burhenne found that mouthbreathing was both a cause of and a contributor to snoring and sleep apnea. He recommended his patients tape their mouths shut at night”
Technique to reduce snoring and to learn to breathe through the nose: “A postage-stamp-size piece of tape at the center of the lips — a Charlie Chaplin mustache moved down an inch. This approach felt less claustrophobic and allowed a little space on the sides of the mouth if I needed to cough or talk. After much trial and error, I settled on 3M Nexcare Durapore “durable cloth” tape, an all-purpose surgical tape with a gentle adhesive. It was comfortable, had no chemical scent, and didn’t leave residue.”
It can even reduce the need to pee at night: “I never woke up needing to pee. I didn’t have to, because my pituitary gland was likely releasing vasopressin. I was finally sleeping soundly”
Part Two — The Lost Art and Science of Breathing
Let’s get to know our nostrils a little bit:
Right nostril: “The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This is because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness”
Left nostril: “Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect: it acts as a brake to the right nostril’s accelerator. The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety. Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite side of the prefrontal cortex, influencing creative thought and playing a role in the formation of mental abstractions and the production of negative emotions”
Technique: Surya Bheda Pranayama: “To gain focus and balance the body and mind, I followed a technique called surya bheda pranayama, which involves taking one breath into the right nostril, then exhaling through the left for several rounds”
Breathing has (at least) two parts: inhaling and exhaling “The most important aspect of breathing wasn’t just to take in air through the nose. Inhaling was the easy part. The key to breathing, lung expansion, and the long life that came with it was on the other end of respiration. It was in the transformative power of a full exhalation.”
And we must breath slowly: “The best way to prevent many chronic health problems, improve athletic performance, and extend longevity was to focus on how we breathed, specifically to balance oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the body. To do this, we’d need to learn how to inhale and exhale slowly.”
And contrary to popular belief, it’s the carbon dioxide what our bodies most need: “What our bodies really want, what they require to function properly, isn’t faster or deeper breaths. It’s not more air. What we need is more carbon dioxide.”
Breathing is even weight-regulating: “For every ten pounds of fat lost in our bodies, eight and a half pounds of it comes out through the lungs; most of it is carbon dioxide mixed with a bit of water vapor. The rest is sweated or urinated out. This is a fact that most doctors, nutritionists, and other medical professionals have historically gotten wrong. The lungs are the weight-regulating system of the body.”
Technique: Resonant or Coherent Breathing: “It turned out that the most efficient breathing rhythm occurred when both the length of respirations and total breaths per minute were locked into a spooky symmetry: 5.5-second inhales followed by 5.5-second exhales, which works out almost exactly to 5.5 breaths a minute. (I explored resonant breathing techniques and an app in this blog post) This was the same pattern of the rosary.” or in other religious chants and prayers in all religions. Prayer heals, especially when it’s practiced at 5.5 breaths a minute.
And as with design, investing or … eating, most of the times, less is best: “Just as we’ve become a culture of overeaters, we’ve also become a culture of overbreathers. Most of us breathe too much, and up to a quarter of the modern population suffers from more serious chronic overbreathing. The fix is easy: breathe less. But that’s harder than it sounds. We’ve become conditioned to breathe too much, just as we’ve been conditioned to eat too much.”
“To be clear, breathing less is not the same as breathing slowly. Average adult lungs can hold about four to six liters of air. Which means that, even if we practice slow breathing at 5.5 breaths per minute, we could still be easily taking in twice the air we need. The key to optimum breathing, and all the health, endurance, and longevity benefits that come with it, is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume. To breathe, but to breathe less.”
It’s all a virtuous cycle: “Slower, longer exhales, of course, mean higher carbon dioxide levels. With that bonus carbon dioxide, we gain a higher aerobic endurance. This measurement of highest oxygen consumption, called VO2 max, is the best gauge of cardiorespiratory fitness. Training the body to breathe less actually increases VO2 max, which can not only boost athletic stamina but also help us live longer and healthier lives.”
Again, the Resonant or Coherent Breathing: “The optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters. The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales. This is the perfect breath.”
Breathing and Chewing. “Researchers have suspected that industrialized food was shrinking our mouths and destroying our breathing for as long as we’ve been eating this way. Our ancient ancestors chewed for hours a day, every day. And because they chewed so much, their mouths, teeth, throats, and faces grew to be wide and strong and pronounced. Food in industrialized societies was so processed that it hardly required any chewing at all.”. So: chew. Dogs do it, and make them do it. Why don’t apply it to ourselves?
Enter advanced breathing, starting with Inner Fire Meditation or Tummo. Originally practiced by Tibetan Buddhists for the past thousand years is now kind of “mainstream”: “Professional surfers, mixed martial arts fighters, and Navy SEALs use Tummo-style breathing to get into the zone before a competition or black ops mission. It’s also especially useful for middle-aged people who suffer from lower-grade stress, aches and pains, and slowing metabolisms”
Wim Hof, commercialized it, but at the same time insists it’s nothing special it’s just another technique: “Hof insisted he wasn’t special; neither were David-Néel or the Tibetan monks. Almost anyone could do what they all did. As Hof put it, we just had to “Breathe, motherfucker!”
Technique: Inner Fire Meditation or Tummo: “To practice Wim Hof’s breathing method:
Start by finding a quiet place and lying flat on your back with a pillow under your head. Relax the shoulders, chest, and legs.
Take a very deep breath into the pit of your stomach and let it back out just as quickly.
Keep breathing this way for 30 cycles. If possible, breathe through the nose; if the nose feels obstructed, try pursed lips. Each breath should look like a wave, with the inhale inflating the stomach, then the chest. You should exhale all the air out in the same order.
At the end of 30 breaths, exhale to the natural conclusion, leaving about a quarter of the air left in the lungs.
Then hold that breath for as long as possible.
Once you’ve reached your breathhold limit, take one huge inhale and hold it another 15 seconds. Very gently, move that fresh breath of air around the chest and to the shoulders, then exhale and start the heavy breathing again.
Repeat the whole pattern three or four rounds and add in some cold exposure (cold shower, ice bath, naked snow angels) a few times a week.
“By teaching anxious people the art of holding their breath. As far back as the first century BCE, inhabitants of what is now India described a system of conscious apnea, which they claimed restored health and ensured long life.”
But why do we feel the need to breath?: “The nagging need to breathe is activated from a cluster of neurons called the central chemoreceptors, located at the base of the brain stem. When we’re breathing too slowly and carbon dioxide levels rise, the central chemoreceptors monitor these changes and send alarm signals to the brain, telling our lungs to breathe faster and more deeply. When we’re breathing too quickly, these chemoreceptors direct the body to breathe more slowly to increase carbon dioxide levels. This is how our bodies determine how fast and often we breathe, not by the amount of oxygen, but by the level of carbon dioxide”
Again, it’s about the carbon dioxide, not about the oxygen.
“Today, chemoreceptor flexibility is part of what distinguishes good athletes from great ones. It’s why some elite mountain climbers can summit Everest without supplemental oxygen, and why some freedivers can hold their breath underwater for ten minutes. All these people have trained their chemoreceptors to withstand extreme fluctuations in carbon dioxide without panic.”. “Physical limits are only half of it. Our mental health relies on chemoreceptor flexibility as well.”
Prana, the flow, (in Sanskrit, “pra” means to fill, and “ana” signifies movement or force), together symbolizing the vital energy that fills and animates the universe. Prana is not merely the breath, though breathing is one of the most direct means of influencing its flow within us. “The more prana something has, the more alive it is. Should this flow of energy ever become blocked, the body would shut down and sickness would follow. If we lose so much prana that we can’t support basic body functions, we die.” Don’t stop the prana.
“Spicy foods contained large doses of prana, which is one of the reasons traditional Indian and Chinese diets are often hot.”. “But the most powerful technique was to inhale prana: to breathe. Breathing techniques were so fundamental to prana that ch’i and ruah and other ancient terms for energy are synonymous with respiration. When we breathe, we expand our life force.”
Technique to remove toxins through breathing: “Once a day, they were to lie down, take a brief inhale, and then exhale to a count of 6. As they progressed, they could inhale to a count of 4 and exhale to 8, with the goal of reaching a half-minute exhale after six months of practice. Upon reaching this 30 count, Rama promised his students, they “will not have any toxins and will be disease-free.”
Rusting and cancer. “When cells lose the ability to offload and absorb electrons, they begin to break down. “Taking out electrons irreversibly means killing,” wrote Szent-Györgyi. This breakdown of electron excitability is what causes metal to rust and leaves to turn brown and die. Humans “rust” as well. As the cells in our bodies lose the ability to attract oxygen, Szent-Györgyi wrote, electrons within them will slow and stop freely interchanging with other cells, resulting in unregulated and abnormal growth. Tissues will begin “rusting” in much the same way as other materials. But we don’t call this “tissue rust.” We call it cancer.”
“Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity.”
Yoga was originally focused on prana. Breathing. “Ancient yoga, and its focus on prana, sitting, and breathing, has turned into a form of aerobic exercise. That isn’t to say modern yoga is bad in any way. It is simply a different practice from the one that first originated 5,000 years ago.”
In a nutshell, this is what I’ve learned from the book:
Shut your mouth. Mouthbreathing is terrible.
Breathe through the nose.
Exhale. One of the first steps in healthy breathing is to extend these breaths, to move the diaphragm up and down a bit more, and to get air out of us before taking a new one in.
Chew. Your diet should consist of the rougher, rawer, and heartier foods our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers ate. The kinds of foods that required an hour or two a day of hard chewing. And in the meantime, lips together, teeth slightly touching, and tongue on the roof of the mouth.
Breathe more, on occasion. Willing yourself to breathe heavily for a short, intense time, however, can be profoundly therapeutic. That’s what techniques like Tummo, Sudarshan Kriya, and vigorous pranayamas do. They stress the body on purpose, snapping it out of its funk so that it can properly function during the other 23 ½ hours a day. Conscious heavy breathing teaches us to be the pilots of our autonomic nervous systems and our bodies, not the passengers.
Hold your breath.
How we breathe matters. The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air. You can practice this perfect breathing for a few minutes, or a few hours. There is no such thing as having too much peak efficiency in your body. Most days, I treat it like a stretch, something I do after a long time sitting or stressing to bring myself back to normal.
April 2024