Breath: The New Science of A Lost Art
I would say that I first truly started to pay attention to my breathing was when my good friend and roommate brought me to my first ever yoga class sometime around 2011 or 2012. Yoga is what led me to find awareness in my body, to literally seeing myself about to enter a fit of road rage and deciding I didn’t need to get mad about someone cutting me off in traffic; something I’ll never forget. From yoga I found meditation, where I learned to use breath to go even deeper into awareness of myself and the world around me. Those years were some of the most transformational times of my life.
I’ve changed in many ways since those years. I still go to yoga but barely as much. I still meditate but not every day, and definitely not the 20-30 mins I used to spend in each session! Still, I do my best to keep up a practice and keep learning. I have explored different kinds of breathing such as Breathwork, a phrase that can mean many things depending on where you are in the world and who you’re talking to. I’ve tried Wim Hoff breathing and several others, and I’m always interested in how we can work on our bodies, emotions, and awareness through things like movement and breath. I looked, and I even did a post about breathing a few years back.
I hadn’t heard of “Breath” until it was gifted to me and as I started reading I was immediately fascinated. Through my own experiences I’m aware of the power of breathing, but this book by James Nestor who is a journalist and writer, was eye opening. Nestor claims that over the years humans have devolved to breathe poorly, and he backs up this statement and many others by providing a lot of historical data and references.
Nestor speaks not only of monks and yogis who can use breath to warm their bodies or put themselves into hyper-relaxed states such that their heart rates look unhealthy, but also athletic coaches who spur on their teams to win gold medals in the olympics as well as doctors who helped cure people of asthma and many other diseases, all from practicing what scientists might call unconventional breathing techniques.
I appreciated the thorough research that was put into this book that also called out times when documented breathing techniques that showed clear trends in helping people improve their lives and health were rejected by the scientific community because there was no way to prove out the scientific cause of the improvements. We are finally getting to a point where breathing is being studied more, but I have to think part of the reason a lot of early work and research has been “forgotten”, or in my thinking, suppressed is obvious: there is no money to be made in people improving their lives through breathing better. Capitalism says we need another pill or procedure, not improved breathing, healthy exercise, and good food.
I’m glad this book exists and hope many people read it to learn about how our breathing has changed over the years as well as many practices and techniques that can be tried easily at home to improve health, clarity of mind and awareness, and life overall. Here are a few of the things I found most fascinating about this book.
7 - In most cases, breathing through your mouth is terrible for you - I remember the term “mouth breather” being popular a few years back. Turns out breathing through the mouth has well documented negative impacts to your overall health. This book claims you get 18% more oxygen when breathing through the nose along with a ton of other benefits.
6 - Multiple Indigenous tribes of North America (50+) were documented to believe that breathing was an important aspect of life force, specifically breathing through the nose, and were known to hold the lips of sleeping babies when they noticed them breathing through their mouths; training them to breathe only through the nose.
5 - The inside the nose is made up of erectile tissue, the same kind of erectile tissue found in the penis and clitoris, and is controlled by the nervous system.
4 - Resting heart rate in some studies has shown to be a factor in life expectancy in most mammals. The lower the resting heart rate, the longer the life expectancy. And what is one of the better ways to lower your resting heart rate? Breathing properly and breathing well.
3 - Part of the reason breathing problems have increased for many people is because the food we eat has gotten progressively softer since the industrial age which has caused the size of our faces to get smaller, causing restricted breathing. There are doctors and orthodontists starting to explore how to expand our jaw and face, but Nestor suggests more practical steps like seeking out heartier foods and doing things like chewing dense gum to get your jaw working more to keep things open.
2 - Apparently we only expel a small amount of the air we take in, leaving a lot of stale air in our lungs. Several breathing researchers claim that one of the keys to health and lung capacity is learning how to fully exhale. A doctor named Carl Stough was able to help emphysema patients who had been suffering for years to find relief in the power of fully exhaling.
1 - Nestor (and several other breath researchers ) claim the optimal way to breathe for efficiency and health is to inhale for 5.5 seconds and exhale for 5.5 seconds, which naturally equates to 5.5 breaths a minute, and roughly 5.5 liters of air. This one is fascinating to me and I’m hoping to explore and practice this a bit.
At the end of the book Nestor highlights all the breath practices he tried while working on the book. While I’ve tried many in the past, several were new to me and I plan to give them a try to see if they might fit as regular practices.
If you got this far, thanks as always for reading! You can purchase the book here.
