Also by James Nestor
Deep: Fr eediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean T ells Us about
OurselvesR I V E R H E A D  B O O K S
A n  i m p r i n t  o f  P e n g u i n  R a n d o m  H o u s e  L L C
p e n g u i n r a n d o m h o u s e . c o m
C o p y r i g h t  ©  2 0 2 0  b y  J a m e s  N e s t o r
P e n g u i n  s u p p o r t s  c o p y r i g h t . C o p y r i g h t  f u e l s  c r e a t i v i t y ,  e n c o u r a g e s  d i v e r s e  v o i c e s ,  p r o m o t e s  f r e e  s p e e c h ,  a n d  c r e a t e s  a  v i b r a n t
c u l t u r e . T h a n k  y o u  f o r  b u y i n g  a n  a u t h o r i z e d  e d i t i o n  o f  t h i s  b o o k  a n d  f o r  c o m p l y i n g  w i t h  c o p y r i g h t  l a w s  b y  n o t  r e p r o d u c i n g ,
s c a n n i n g ,  o r  d i s t r i b u t i n g  a n y  p a r t  o f  i t  i n  a n y  f o r m  w i t h o u t  p e r m i s s i o n . Y o u  a r e  s u p p o r t i n g  w r i t e r s  a n d  a l l o w i n g  P e n g u i n  t o
c o n t i n u e  t o  p u b l i s h  b o o k s  f o r  e v e r y  r e a d e r . R i v e r h e a d  a n d  t h e  R  c o l o p h o n  a r e  r e g i s t e r e d  t r a d e m a r k s  o f  P e n g u i n  R a n d o m  H o u s e  L L C . L i b r a r y  o f  C o n g r e s s  C a t a l o g i n g - i n - P u b l i c a t i o n  D a t a
N a m e s :  N e s t o r ,  J a m e s ,  a u t h o r . T i t l e :  B r e a t h  :  t h e  n e w  s c i e n c e  o f  a  l o s t  a r t  /  J a m e s  N e s t o r . D e s c r i p t i o n :  N e w  Y o r k  :  R i v e r h e a d  B o o k s ,  2 0 2 0 . |  I n c l u d e s  b i b l i o g r a p h i c a l  r e f e r e n c e s  a n d  i n d e x . I d e n t i f i e r s :  L C C N  2 0 1 9 0 5 0 8 6 3  ( p r i n t )  |  L C C N  2 0 1 9 0 5 0 8 6 4  ( e b o o k )  |  I S B N  9 7 8 0 7 3 5 2 1 3 6 1 6  ( h a r d c o v e r )  |  I S B N  9 7 8 0 7 3 5 2 1 3 6 3 0
( e b o o k )
S u b j e c t s :  L C S H :  B r e a t h i n g  e x e r c i s e s . |  R e s p i r a t i o n . C l a s s i f i c a t i o n :  L C C  R A 7 8 2  . N 4 7  2 0 2 0  ( p r i n t )  |  L C C  R A 7 8 2  ( e b o o k )  |  D D C  6 1 3 / . 1 9 2 — d c 2 3
L C  r e c o r d  a v a i l a b l e  a t  h t t p s : / / l c c n . l o c . g o v / 2 0 1 9 0 5 0 8 6 3
L C  e b o o k  r e c o r d  a v a i l a b l e  a t  h t t p s : / / l c c n . l o c . g o v / 2 0 1 9 0 5 0 8 6 4
N e i t h e r  t h e  p u b l i s h e r  n o r  t h e  a u t h o r  i s  e n g a g e d  i n  r e n d e r i n g  p r o f e s s i o n a l  a d v i c e  o r  s e r v i c e s  t o  t h e  i n d i v i d u a l  r e a d e r . T h e  i d e a s ,
p r o c e d u r e s ,  a n d  s u g g e s t i o n s  c o n t a i n e d  i n  t h i s  b o o k  a r e  n o t  i n t e n d e d  a s  a  s u b s t i t u t e  f o r  c o n s u l t i n g  w i t h  y o u r  p h y s i c i a n . A l l  m a t t e r s
r e g a r d i n g  y o u r  h e a l t h  r e q u i r e  m e d i c a l  s u p e r v i s i o n . N e i t h e r  t h e  a u t h o r  n o r  t h e  p u b l i s h e r  s h a l l  b e  l i a b l e  o r  r e s p o n s i b l e  f o r  a n y  l o s s
o r  d a m a g e  a l l e g e d l y  a r i s i n g  f r o m  a n y  i n f o r m a t i o n  o r  s u g g e s t i o n  i n  t h i s  b o o k . W h i l e  t h e  a u t h o r  h a s  m a d e  e v e r y  e f f o r t  t o  p r o v i d e  a c c u r a t e  t e l e p h o n e  n u m b e r s ,  i n t e r n e t  a d d r e s s e s ,  a n d  o t h e r  c o n t a c t  i n f o r m a t i o n  a t
t h e  t i m e  o f  p u b l i c a t i o n ,  n e i t h e r  t h e  p u b l i s h e r  n o r  t h e  a u t h o r  a s s u m e s  a n y  r e s p o n s i b i l i t y  f o r  e r r o r s ,  o r  f o r  c h a n g e s  t h a t  o c c u r  a f t e r
p u b l i c a t i o n . F u r t h e r ,  t h e  p u b l i s h e r  d o e s  n o t  h a v e  a n y  c o n t r o l  o v e r  a n d  d o e s  n o t  a s s u m e  a n y  r e s p o n s i b i l i t y  f o r  a u t h o r  o r  t h i r d - p a r t y
w e b s i t e s  o r  t h e i r  c o n t e n t . C o v e r  d e s i g n :  G r a c e  H a n  a n d  L a u r e n  P e t e r s - C o l l a e r
C o v e r  i m a g e :  M i l l e t S t u d i o  /  S h u t t e r s t o c k
p i d _ p r h _ 5 . 5 . 0 _ c 0 _ r 0To K.S.In transporting the br eath, the inhalation must be full. When it is
full, it has big capacity . When it has big capacity , it can be
extended. When it is extended, it can penetrate downwar d. When
it penetrates downwar d, it will become calmly settled. When it is
calmly settled, it will be str ong and firm. When it is str ong and
firm, it will germinate. When it germinates, it will gr ow . When it
gr ows, it will r etr eat upwar d. When it r etr eats upwar d, it will
r each the top of the head. The secr et power of Pr ovidence moves
above. The secr et power of the Earth moves below . He who follows this will live. He who acts against this will die. — 5 0 0  B C E  Z H O U  D Y N A S T Y  S T O N E  I N S C R I P T I O NCONTENTS
Introduction
Part One – The Experiment
Chapter One    The W orst Breathers in the Animal Kingdom
Chapter T wo    Mouthbreathing
Part T wo – The Lost Art and Science of Breathing
Chapter Thr ee    Nose
Chapter Four    Exhale
Chapter Five    Slow
Chapter Six    Less
Chapter Seven    Chew
Part Three – Breathing+
Chapter Eight    More, on Occasion
Chapter Nine    Hold It
Chapter T en    Fast, Slow , and Not at All
Epilogue    A Last Gasp
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Breathing Methods
Notes
IndexINTRODUCTION
The place looked like something out of Amityville: all paint-chipped walls,
dusty windows, and menacing shadows cast by moonlight. I walked
through a gate, up a flight of creaking steps, and knocked on the door . When it swung open, a woman in her 30s with woolly eyebrows and
oversize white teeth welcomed me inside. She asked me to take of f my
shoes, then led me to a cavernous living room, its ceiling painted sky blue
with wispy clouds. I took a seat beside a window that rattled in the breeze
and watched through jaundiced streetlight as others walked in. A guy with
prisoner eyes. A stern-faced man with Jerry Lewis bangs. A blond woman
with an of f-center bindi on her forehead. Through the rustle of shuf fling
feet and whispered hellos, a truck rumbled down the street blasting “Paper
Planes,” the inescapable anthem of the day . I removed my belt, loosened the
top button on my jeans, and settled in. I’d come here on the recommendation of my doctor , who’d told me, “A
breathing class could help.” It could help strengthen my failing lungs, calm
my frazzled mind, maybe give me perspective. For the past few months, I’d been going through a rough patch. My job
was stressing me out and my 130-year -old house was falling apart. I’d just
recovered from pneumonia, which I’d also had the year before and the year
before that. I was spending most of my time at home wheezing, working,
and eating three meals a day out of the same bowl while hunched over
week-old newspapers on the couch. I was in a rut—physically , mentally ,
and otherwise. After a few months of living this way , I took my doctor ’ s
advice and signed up for an introductory course in breathing to learn a
technique called Sudarshan Kriya. At 7:00 p.m., the bushy-browed woman locked the front door , sat in the
middle of the group, inserted a cassette tape into a beat-up boom box, andpressed play . She told us to close our eyes. Through hissing static, the voice
of a man with an Indian accent flowed from the speakers. It was squeaky ,
lilting, and too melodious to sound natural, as if it had been taken from a
cartoon. The voice instructed us to inhale slowly through our noses, then to
exhale slowly . T o focus on our breath. W e repeated this process for a few minutes. I reached over to a pile of
blankets and wrapped one around my legs to keep my stocking feet warm
beneath the drafty window . I kept breathing but nothing happened. No
calmness swept over me; no tension released from my tight muscles. Nothing. T en, maybe 20 minutes passed. I started getting annoyed and a bit
resentful that I’d chosen to spend my evening inhaling dusty air on the floor
of an old V ictorian. I opened my eyes and looked around. Everyone had the
same somber , bored look. Prisoner Eyes appeared to be sleeping. Jerry
Lewis looked like he was relieving himself. Bindi sat frozen with a
Cheshire Cat smile on her face. I thought about getting up and leaving, but I
didn’ t want to be rude. The session was free; the instructor wasn’ t paid to
be here. I needed to respect her charity . So I closed my eyes again, wrapped
the blanket a little tighter , and kept breathing. Then something happened. I wasn’ t conscious of any transformation
taking place. I never felt myself relax or the swarm of nagging thoughts
leave my head. But it was as if I’d been taken from one place and deposited
somewhere else. It happened in an instant. The tape came to an end and I opened my eyes. There was something
wet on my head. I lifted my hand to wipe it of f and noticed my hair was
sopping. I ran my hand down my face, felt the sting of sweat in my eyes,
and tasted salt. I looked down at my torso and noticed sweat blotches on my
sweater and jeans. The temperature in the room was about 68 degrees—
much cooler beneath the drafty window . Everyone had been covered in
jackets and hoodies to keep warm. But I had somehow sweated through my
clothes as if I’d just run a marathon. The instructor approached and asked if I was OK, if I’d been sick or had
a fever . I told her I felt perfectly fine. Then she said something about the
body’ s heat, and how each inhaled breath provides us with new ener gy and
each exhale releases old, stale ener gy . I tried to take it in but was having
trouble focusing. I was preoccupied with how I was going to ride my bike
three miles home from the Haight-Ashbury in sweat-soaked clothes.The next day I felt even better . As advertised, there was a feeling of
calm and quiet that I hadn’ t experienced in a long time. I slept well. The
little things in life didn’ t bother me as much. The tension was gone from my
shoulders and neck. This lasted a few days before the feeling faded out. What exactly had happened? How did sitting cross-legged in a funky
house and breathing for an hour trigger such a profound reaction? I returned to the breathing class the next week: same experience, fewer
waterworks. I didn’ t mention any of it to family members or friends. But I
worked to understand what had happened, and I spent the next several years
trying to figure it out. —
Over that span of time, I fixed up my house, got out of my funk, and got a
lead that might answer some of my questions about breathing. I went to
Greece to write a story on freediving, the ancient practice of diving
hundreds of feet below the water ’ s surface on a single breath of air . Between dives, I interviewed dozens of experts, hoping to gain some
perspective on what they did and why . I wanted to know how these
unassuming-looking people—software engineers, advertising executives,
biologists, and physicians—had trained their bodies to go without air for 12
minutes at a time, diving to depths far beyond what scientists thought
possible. When most people go underwater in a pool they bail out at ten feet after
just a few seconds, ears screaming. The freedivers told me they’d
previously been “most people.” Their transformation was a matter of
training; they’d coaxed their lungs to work harder , to tap the pulmonary
capabilities that the rest of us ignore. They insisted they weren’ t special. Anyone in reasonable health willing to put in the hours could dive to 100,
200, even 300 feet. It didn’ t matter how old you were, how much you
weighed, or what your genetic makeup was. T o freedive, they said, all
anyone had to do was master the art of breathing. T o them breathing wasn’ t an unconscious act; it wasn’ t something they
just did . It was a force, a medicine, and a mechanism through which they
could gain an almost superhuman power . “There are as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat,” said one
female instructor who had held her breath for more than eight minutes and
once dived below 300 feet. “And each way we breathe will af fect ourbodies in dif ferent ways.” Another diver told me that some methods of
breathing will nourish our brains, while others will kill neurons; some will
make us healthy , while others will hasten our death. They told crazy stories, about how they’d breathed in ways that
expanded the size of their lungs by 30 percent or more. They told me about
an Indian doctor who lost several pounds by simply changing the way he
inhaled, and about another man who was injected with the bacterial
endotoxin E. coli , then breathed in a rhythmic pattern to stimulate his
immune system and destroy the toxins within minutes. They told me about
women who put their cancers into remission and monks who could melt
circles in the snow around their bare bodies over a period of several hours. It all sounded nuts. During my of f-hours from doing underwater research, usually late at
night, I read through reams of literature on the subject. Surely someone had
studied the ef fects of this conscious breathing on landlubbers? Surely
someone had corroborated the freedivers’ fantastic stories of using
breathing for weight loss, health, and longevity? I found a library’ s worth of material. The problem was, the sources were
hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old. Seven books of the Chinese T ao dating back to around 400 BCE  focused
entirely on breathing, how it could kill us or heal us, depending on how we
used it. These manuscripts included detailed instructions on how to regulate
the breath, slow it, hold it, and swallow it. Even earlier , Hindus considered
breath and spirit the same thing, and described elaborate practices that were
meant to balance breathing and preserve both physical and mental health. Then there were the Buddhists, who used breathing not only to lengthen
their lives but to reach higher planes of consciousness. Breathing, for all
these people, for all these cultures, was powerful medicine. “Therefore, the scholar who nourishes his life refines the form and
nourishes his breath,” says an ancient T ao text. “Isn’ t this evident?”
Not so much. I looked for some kind of verification of these claims in
more recent research in pulmonology , the medical discipline that deals with
the lungs and the respiratory tract, but found next to nothing. According to
what I did find, breathing technique wasn’ t important. Many doctors,
researchers, and scientists I interviewed confirmed this position. T wenty
times a minute, ten times, through the mouth, nose, or breathing tube, it’ s
all the same. The point is to get air in and let the body do the rest.T o get a sense of how breathing is regarded by modern medical
professionals, think back to your last check-up. Chances are your doctor
took your blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, then placed a stethoscope
to your chest to assess the health of your heart and lungs. Maybe she
discussed diet, taking vitamins, stresses at work. Any issues digesting food? How about sleep? W ere the seasonal aller gies getting worse? Asthma? What about those headaches? But she likely never checked your respiratory rate. She never checked
the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your bloodstream. How you
breathe and the quality of each breath were not on the menu. Even so, if the freedivers and the ancient texts were to be believed, how
we breathe af fects all things. How could it be so important and unimportant
at the same time? —
I kept digging, and slowly a story began to unfold. As I found out, I was not
the only person who’d recently started asking these questions. While I was
paging through texts and interviewing freedivers and super -breathers,
scientists at Harvard, Stanford, and other renowned institutions were
confirming some of the wildest stories I’d been hearing. But their work
wasn’ t happening in the pulmonology labs. Pulmonologists, I learned, work
mainly on specific maladies of the lungs—collapse, cancer , emphysema. “W e’re dealing with emer gencies,” one veteran pulmonologist told me. “That’ s how the system works.”
No, this breathing research has been taking place elsewhere: in the
muddy digs of ancient burial sites, the easy chairs of dental of fices, and the
rubber rooms of mental hospitals. Not the kinds of places where you’d
expect to find cutting-edge research into a biological function. Few of these scientists set out to study breathing. But, somehow , in
some way , breathing kept finding them. They discovered that our capacity
to breathe has changed through the long processes of human evolution, and
that the way we breathe has gotten markedly worse since the dawn of the
Industrial Age. They discovered that 90 percent of us—very likely me, you,
and almost everyone you know—is breathing incorrectly and that this
failure is either causing or aggravating a laundry list of chronic diseases. On a more inspiring note, some of these researchers were also showing
that many modern maladies—asthma, anxiety , attention deficithyperactivity disorder , psoriasis, and more—could either be reduced or
reversed simply by changing the way we inhale and exhale. This work was upending long-held beliefs in W estern medical science. Y es, breathing in dif ferent patterns really can influence our body weight and
overall health. Y es, how we breathe really does af fect the size and function
of our lungs. Y es, breathing allows us to hack into our own nervous system,
control our immune response, and restore our health. Y es, changing how we
breathe will help us live longer . No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how resilient our genes
are, how skinny or young or wise we are—none of it will matter unless
we’re breathing correctly . That’ s what these researchers discovered. The
missing pillar in health is breath. It all starts there. •       •       •
This book is a scientific adventure into the lost art and science of breathing. It explores the transformation that occurs inside our bodies every 3.3
seconds, the time it takes the average person to inhale and exhale. It
explains how the billions and billions of molecules you bring in with each
breath have built your bones, sheaths of muscle, blood, brains, and or gans,
and the emer ging science of how these microscopic bits will influence your
health and happiness tomorrow , next week, next month, next year , and
decades from now . I call this a “lost art” because so many of these new discoveries aren’ t
new at all. Most of the techniques I’ll be exploring have been around for
hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. They were created, documented,
for gotten, and discovered in another culture at another time, then for gotten
again. This went on for centuries. Many early pioneers in this discipline weren’ t scientists. They were
tinkerers, a kind of rogue group I call “pulmonauts,” who stumbled on the
powers of breathing because nothing else could help them. They were Civil
W ar sur geons, French hairdressers, anarchist opera singers, Indian mystics,
irritable swim coaches, stern-faced Ukrainian cardiologists,
Czechoslovakian Olympians, and North Carolina choral conductors. Few of these pulmonauts achieved much fame or respect when they
were alive, and when they died their research was buried and scattered. It
was even more fascinating to learn that, during the past few years, theirtechniques were being rediscovered and scientifically tested and proven. The fruits of this once-fringe, often for gotten research are now redefining
the potential of the human body . —
But why do I need to learn how to br eathe? I’ve been br eathing my whole
life. This question, which you may be asking now , has been popping up ever
since I began my research. W e assume, at our peril, that breathing is a
passive action, just something that we do: breathe, live; stop breathing, die. But breathing is not binary . And the more I immersed myself in this subject,
the more personally invested I felt about sharing this basic truth. Like most adults, I too have suf fered from a host of respiratory problems
in my life. That’ s what landed me at the breathing class years ago. And like
most people, I found that no aller gy drug, inhaler , mix of supplements, or
diet did much good. In the end, it was a new generation of pulmonauts who
of fered me a cure, and then they of fered so much more. It will take the average reader about 10,000 breaths to read from here to
the end of the book. If I’ve done my job correctly , starting now , with every
breath you take, you’ll have a deeper understanding of breathing and how
best to do it. T wenty times a minute, ten times, through the mouth, nose,
tracheostomy , or breathing tube, it’ s not all the same. How we breathe really
matters. By your thousandth breath, you’ll understand why modern humans are
the only species with chronically crooked teeth, and why that’ s relevant to
breathing. Y ou’ll know how our ability to breathe has deteriorated over the
ages, and why our cavemen ancestors didn’ t snore. Y ou’ll have followed
two middle-aged men as they struggle through a pioneering and masochistic
20-day study at Stanford University to test the long-held belief that the
pathway through which we breathe—nose or mouth—is inconsequential. Some of what you’ll learn will ruin your days and nights, especially if you
snore. But in your next breaths, you’ll find remedies. By your 3,000th breath, you’ll know the basics of restorative breathing. These slow and long techniques are open to everyone—old and young, sick
and healthy , rich and poor . They’ve been practiced in Hinduism, Buddhism,
Christianity , and other religions for thousands of years, but only recentlyhave we learned how they can reduce blood pressure, boost athletic
performance, and balance the nervous system. By your 6,000th breath, you will have moved into the land of serious,
conscious breathing. Y ou’ll travel past the mouth and nose, deeper into the
lungs, and you’ll meet a midcentury pulmonaut who healed W orld W ar II
veterans of emphysema and trained Olympic sprinters to win gold medals,
all by harnessing the power of the exhale. By your 8,000th breath, you’ll have pushed even deeper into the body to
tap, of all things, the nervous system. Y ou’ll discover the power of
overbreathing. Y ou’ll meet with pulmonauts who have used breathing to
straighten scoliotic spines, blunt autoimmune diseases, and superheat
themselves in subzero temperatures. None of this should be possible, and
yet, as you will see, it is. Along the way , I’ll be learning, too, trying to
understand what happened to me in that V ictorian house a decade ago. By your 10,000th breath, and the close of this book, you and I will know
how the air that enters your lungs af fects every moment of your life and
how to harness it to its full potential until your final breath. This book will explore many things: evolution, medical history ,
biochemistry , physiology , physics, athletic endurance, and more. But mostly
it will explore you . By the law of averages, you will take 670 million breaths in your
lifetime. Maybe you’ve already taken half of those. Maybe you’re on breath
669,000,000. Maybe you’d like to take a few million more.Part One
THE EXPERIMENTOne
THE WORST BREATHERS IN THE ANIMAL
KINGDOM
The patient arrived, pale and torpid, at 9:32 a.m. Male, middle-aged, 175
pounds. T alkative and friendly but visibly anxious. Pain: none. Fatigue: a
little. Level of anxiety: moderate. Fears about progression and future
symptoms: high. Patient reported that he was raised in a modern suburban environment,
bottle-fed at six months, and weaned onto jarred commercial foods. The
lack of chewing associated with this soft diet stunted bone development in
his dental arches and sinus cavity , leading to chronic nasal congestion. By age 15, patient was subsisting on even softer , highly processed foods
consisting mostly of white bread, sweetened fruit juices, canned vegetables,
Steak-umms, V elveeta sandwiches, microwave taquitos, Hostess Sno Balls,
and Reggie! bars. His mouth had become so underdeveloped it could not
accommodate 32 permanent teeth; incisors and canines grew in crooked,
requiring extractions, braces, retainers, and headgear to straighten. Three
years of orthodontics made his small mouth even smaller , so his tongue no
longer properly fit between his teeth. When he stuck it out, which he did
often, visible imprints laced its sides, a precursor to snoring. At 17, four impacted wisdom teeth were removed, which further
decreased the size of his mouth while increasing his chances of developing
the chronic nocturnal choking known as sleep apnea. As he aged into his
20s and 30s, his breathing became more labored and dysfunctional and his
airways became more obstructed. His face would continue a vertical growthpattern that led to sagging eyes, doughy cheeks, a sloping forehead, and a
protruding nose. This atrophied, underdeveloped mouth, throat, and skull, unfortunately ,
belongs to me. I’m lying on the examination chair in the Stanford Department of
Otolaryngology Head and Neck Sur gery Center looking at myself, looking
into myself. For the past several minutes, Dr . Jayakar Nayak, a nasal and
sinus sur geon, has been gingerly coaxing an endoscope camera through my
nose. He’ s gone so deep into my head that it’ s come out the other side, into
my throat. “Say eeee ,” he says. Nayak has a halo of black hair , square glasses,
cushioned running shoes, and a white coat. But I’m not looking at his
clothes, or his face. I’m wearing a pair of video goggles that are streaming a
live feed of the journey through the rolling dunes, swampy marshes, and
stalactites inside my severely damaged sinuses. I’m trying not to cough or
choke or gag as that endoscope squirms a little farther down. “Say eeee ,” Nayak repeats. I say it and watch as the soft tissue around
my larynx, pink and fleshy and coated in slime, opens and closes like a
stop-motion Geor gia O’Keef fe flower . This isn’ t a pleasure cruise. T wenty-five sextillion molecules (that’ s 250
with 20 zeros after it) take this same voyage 18 times a minute, 25,000
times a day . I’ve come here to see, feel, and learn where all this air is
supposed to enter our bodies. And I’ve come to say goodbye to my nose for
the next ten days. —
For the past century , the prevailing belief in W estern medicine was that the
nose was more or less an ancillary or gan. W e should breathe out of it if we
can, the thinking went, but if not, no problem. That’ s what the mouth is for . Many doctors, researchers, and scientists still support this position. There are 27 departments at the National Institutes of Health devoted to
lungs, eyes, skin disease, ears, and so on. The nose and sinuses aren’ t
represented in any of them. Nayak finds this absurd. He is the chief of rhinology research at
Stanford. He heads an internationally renowned laboratory focused entirely
on understanding the hidden power of the nose. He’ s found that those
dunes, stalactites, and marshes inside the human head orchestrate amultitude of functions for the body . V ital functions. “Those structures are in
there for a reason!” he told me earlier . Nayak has a special reverence for the
nose, which he believes is greatly misunderstood and underappreciated. Which is why he’ s so interested to see what happens to a body that
functions without one. Which is what brought me here. Starting today , I’ll spend the next quarter of a million breaths with
silicone plugs blocking my nostrils and sur gical tape over the plugs to stop
even the faintest amount of air from entering or exiting my nose. I’ll
breathe only through my mouth, a heinous experiment that will be
exhausting and miserable, but has a clear point. Forty percent of today’ s population suf fers from chronic nasal
obstruction, and around half of us are habitual mouthbreathers, with
females and children suf fering the most. The causes are many: dry air to
stress, inflammation to aller gies, 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. When mouths don’ t grow wide enough, the roof of the mouth tends to
rise up instead of out, forming what’ s called a V -shape or high-arched
palate. The upward growth impedes the development of the nasal cavity ,
shrinking it and disrupting the delicate structures in the nose. The reduced
nasal space leads to obstruction and inhibits airflow . Overall, humans have
the sad distinction of being the most plugged-up species on Earth. I should know . Before probing my nasal cavities, Nayak took an X-ray
of my head, which provided a deli-slicer view of every nook and cranny in
my mouth, sinuses, and upper airways. “Y ou’ve got some . . . stuff ,” he said. Not only did I have a V -shape
palate, I also had “severe” obstruction to the left nostril caused by a
“severely” deviated septum. My sinuses were also riddled with a profusion
of deformities called concha bullosa . “Super uncommon,” said Nayak. It
was a phrase nobody wants to hear from a doctor . My airways were such a mess that Nayak was amazed I hadn’ t suf fered
from even more of the infections and respiration problems I’d known as a
kid. But he was reasonably certain I could expect some degree of serious
breathing problems in the future. Over the next ten days of forced mouthbreathing, I’ll be putting myself
inside a kind of mucousy crystal ball, amplifying and hastening the
deleterious ef fects on my breathing and my health, which will keep gettingworse as I get older . I’ll be lulling my body into a state it already knows,
that half the population knows, only multiplying it many times. “OK, hold steady ,” Nayak says. He grabs a steel needle with a wire
brush at the end, about the size of a mascara brush. I’m thinking, He’ s not
going to put that thing up my nose. A few seconds later , he puts that thing
up my nose. I watch through the video goggles as Nayak maneuvers the brush
deeper . He keeps sliding until it is no longer up my nose, no longer playing
around my nasal hair , but wiggling inside of my head a few inches deep. “Steady , steady ,” he says. When the nasal cavity gets congested, airflow decreases and bacteria
flourish. These bacteria replicate and can lead to infections and colds and
more congestion. Congestion begets congestion, which gives us no other
option but to habitually breathe from the mouth. Nobody knows how soon
this damage occurs. Nobody knows how quickly bacteria accumulate in an
obstructed nasal cavity . Nayak needs to grab a culture of my deep nasal
tissue to find out. I wince as I watch him twist the brush deeper still, then spin it,
skimming of f a layer of gunk. The nerves this far up the nose are designed
to feel the subtle flow of air and slight modulations in air temperature, not
steel brushes. Even though he’ s dabbed an anesthetic in there, I can still feel
it. My brain has a hard time knowing exactly what to do, how to react. It’ s
dif ficult to explain, but it feels like someone is needling a conjoined twin
that exists somewhere outside of my own head. “The things you never thought you’d be doing with your life,” Nayak
laughs, putting the bleeding tip of the brush into a test tube. He’ll compare
the 200,000 cells from my sinuses with another sample ten days from now
to see how nasal obstruction af fects bacterial growth. He shakes the test
tube, hands it to his assistant, and politely asks me to take the video goggles
of f and make room for his next patient. Patient #2 is leaning against the window and snapping photos with his
phone. He’ s 49 years old, deeply tanned with white hair and Smurf-blue
eyes, and he’ s wearing spotless beige jeans and leather loafers without
socks. His name is Anders Olsson, and he’ s flown 5,000 miles from
Stockholm, Sweden. Along with me, he’ s ponied up more than $5,000 to
join the experiment.I’d interviewed Olsson several months ago after coming across his
website. It had all the red flags of flakiness: stock images of blond women
striking hero poses on mountaintops, neon colors, frantic use of
exclamation points, and bubble fonts. But Olsson wasn’ t some fringe
character . He’d spent ten years collecting and conducting serious scientific
research. He’d written dozens of posts and self-published a book explaining
breathing from the subatomic level on up, all annotated with hundreds of
studies. He’d also become one of Scandinavia’ s most respected and popular
breathing therapists, helping to heal thousands of patients through the subtle
power of healthy breathing. When I mentioned during one of our Skype conversations that I would
be mouthbreathing for ten days during an experiment, he cringed. When I
asked if he wanted to join in, he refused. “I do not want to,” he declared. “But I am curious.”
Now , months later , Olsson plops his jet-lagged body onto the
examination chair , puts on the video glasses, and inhales one of his last
nasal breaths for the next 240 hours. Beside him, Nayak twirls the steel
endoscope the way a heavy metal drummer handles a drumstick. “OK, lean
your head back,” says Nayak. A twist of the wrist, a crane of the neck, and
he goes deep. The experiment is set up in two phases. Phase I consists of plugging our
noses and attempting to live our everyday lives. W e’ll eat, exercise, and
sleep as usual, only we’ll do it while breathing only through our mouths. In
Phase II, we’ll eat, drink, exercise, and sleep like we did during Phase I, but
we’ll switch the pathway and breathe through our noses and practice a
number of breathing techniques throughout the day . Between phases we’ll return to Stanford and repeat all the tests we’ve
just taken: blood gases, inflammatory markers, hormone levels, smell,
rhinometry , pulmonary function, and more. Nayak will compare data sets
and see what, if anything, changed in our brains and bodies as we shifted
our style of breathing. I’d gotten a fair share of gasps from friends when I told them about the
experiment. “Don’ t do it!” a few yoga devotees warned. But most people
just shrugged. “I haven’ t breathed out of my nose in a decade,” said a friend
who had suf fered aller gies most of his life. Everyone else said the
equivalent of: What’ s the big deal? Br eathing is br eathing. Is it? Olsson and I will spend the next 20 days finding out.•       •       •
A while back, some 4 billion years ago, our earliest ancestors appeared on
some rocks. W e were small then, a microscopic ball of sludge. And we were
hungry . W e needed ener gy to live and proliferate. So we found a way to eat
air . The atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide then, not the best fuel, but it
worked well enough. These early versions of us learned to take this gas in,
break it down, and spit out what was left: oxygen. For the next billion years,
the primordial goo kept doing this, eating more gas, making more sludge,
and excreting more oxygen. Then, around two and a half billion years ago, there was enough oxygen
waste in the atmosphere that a scavenger ancestor emer ged to make use of
it. It learned to gulp in all that leftover oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide:
the first cycle of aerobic life. Oxygen, it turned out, produced 16 times more ener gy than carbon
dioxide. Aerobic life forms used this boost to evolve, to leave the sludge-
covered rocks behind and grow lar ger and more complex. They crawled up
to land, dove deep into the sea, and flew into the air . They became plants,
trees, birds, bees, and the earliest mammals. Mammals grew noses to warm and purify the air , throats to guide air
into lungs, and a network of sacs that would remove oxygen from the
atmosphere and transfer it into the blood. The aerobic cells that once clung
to swampy rocks so many eons ago now made up the tissues in mammalian
bodies. These cells took oxygen from our blood and returned carbon
dioxide, which traveled back through the veins, through the lungs, and into
the atmosphere: the process of breathing. The ability to breathe so ef ficiently in a wide variety of ways—
consciously and unconsciously; fast, slow , and not at all—allowed our
mammal ancestors to catch prey , escape predators, and adapt to dif ferent
environments. It was all going so well until about 1.5 million years ago, when the
pathways through which we took in and exhaled air began to shift and
fissure. It was a shift that, much later in history , would af fect the breathing
of every person on Earth. I’d been feeling these cracks for much of my life, and chances are you
have, too: stuf fy noses, snoring, some degree of wheezing, asthma,aller gies, and the rest. I’d always thought they were a normal part of being
human. Nearly everyone I knew suf fered from one problem or another . But I came to learn that these problems didn’ t randomly develop. Something caused them. And the answers could be found in a common and
homely human trait. —
A few months before the Stanford experiment, I flew to Philadelphia to visit
Dr . Marianna Evans, an orthodontist and dental researcher who’d spent the
last several years looking into the mouths of human skulls, both ancient and
modern. W e were standing in the basement of the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology , surrounded by
several hundred specimens. Each was engraved with letters and numbers
and stamped with its “race”: Bedouin , Copt , Arab of Egypt , Negr o Born in
Africa . There were Brazilian prostitutes, Arab slaves, and Persian prisoners. The most famous specimen, I was told, came from an Irish prisoner who’d
been hanged in 1824 for killing and eating fellow convicts. The skulls ranged from 200 to thousands of years old. They were part of
the Morton Collection, named after a racist scientist named Samuel Morton,
who, starting in the 1830s, collected skeletons in a failed attempt to prove
the superiority of the Caucasian race. The only positive outcome of
Morton’ s work is the skulls he spent two decades gathering, which now
provide a snapshot of how people used to look and breathe. Where Morton claimed to see inferior races and genetic “degradation,”
Evans discovered something close to perfection. T o demonstrate what she
meant, she walked over to a cabinet and retrieved a skull marked Parsee,
for Persian, from behind the protective glass. She wiped bone dust on the
sleeve of her cashmere sweater and ran a neatly trimmed fingernail along its
jaw and face. “These are twice as lar ge as they are today ,” she said in a staccato
Ukrainian accent. She was pointing at the nasal apertures, the two holes in
the back of the throat that connect to the nasal passages. She turned the
skull around so it was staring at us. “So wide and pronounced,” she said
approvingly . Evans and her colleague Dr . Kevin Boyd, a Chicago-based pediatric
dentist, have spent the last four years X-raying more than 100 skulls from
the Morton Collection and measuring the angles from the top of the ear tothe nose and from the forehead to the chin. These measurements, which are
called the Frankfort plane and N-perpendicular , show the symmetry of each
specimen, how well-proportioned the mouth was relative to the face, the
nose to the palate, and, to a lar ge extent, how well the people who owned
these skulls might have breathed. Every one of the ancient skulls was identical to the Parsee  sample. They
all had enormous forward-facing jaws. They had expansive sinus cavities
and broad mouths. And, bizarrely , even though none of the ancient people
ever flossed, or brushed, or saw a dentist, they all had straight teeth. The forward facial growth and lar ge mouths also created wider airways. These people very likely never snored or had sleep apnea or sinusitis or
many other chronic respiratory problems that af fect modern populations. They did not because they could not. Their skulls were far too lar ge, and
their airways too wide for anything to block them. They breathed easy . Nearly all ancient humans shared this forward structure—not just in the
Morton Collection, but everywhere around the world. This remained true
from the time when Homo  sapiens  first appeared, some 300,000 years ago,
to just a few hundred years ago. Evans and Boyd then compared the ancient skulls to the modern skulls
of their own patients and others. Every modern skull had the opposite
growth pattern, meaning the angles of the Frankfort plane and N-
perpendicular were reversed: chins had recessed behind foreheads, jaws
were slumped back, sinuses shrunken. All the modern skulls showed some
degree of crooked teeth. Of the 5,400 dif ferent species of mammals on the planet, humans are
now the only ones to routinely have misaligned jaws, overbites, underbites,
and snaggled teeth, a condition formally called malocclusion. T o Evans, this raised a fundamental question: “Why would we evolve to
make ourselves sick?” she asked. She put the Parsee  skull back in the
cabinet and took out another labeled Saccar d . Its perfect facial form was a
mirror image of the others. “That’ s what we’re trying to find out,” she said. Evolution doesn’ t always mean progress, Evans told me. It means
change. And life can change for better or worse. T oday , the human body is
changing in ways that have nothing to do with the “survival of the fittest.”
Instead, 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 . T o understand how this all happened, and why , Evans told me, we need
to go back in time. W ay back. T o before Homo sapiens  were even sapiens . •       •       •
What strange creatures. Standing in the tall grass of the savanna, all gangly
arms and pointy elbows, gazing out into the wide, wild world from
foreheads that looked like hairy visors. As the breeze swayed the grass, our
nostrils, the size of gum drops, flexed vertically above our chinless mouths,
picking up whatever scents the wind brought in. The time was 1.7 million years ago, and the first human ancestor , Homo
habilis , was roaming the eastern shores of Africa. W e’d long since left the
trees, learned to walk on our legs, and trained ourselves to use the small
“finger” on the inside of our hands, to turn it upside down into an opposable
thumb. W e used this thumb and fingers to grab things, to pull plants and
roots and grasses from the ground, and to build hunting tools from stone
that were sharp enough to carve tongues out of antelope and strip meat from
bone. Eating this raw diet took a lot of time and ef fort. So we gathered stones
and bashed prey against rocks. T enderizing food, especially meat, spared us
from some of the ef fort of digesting and chewing, which saved ener gy . W e
used this extra ener gy to grow a lar ger brain. Grilling food was even better . Around 800,000 years ago, we began
processing food in fire, which released an enormous amount of additional
calories. Our lar ge intestines, which helped break down rough and fibrous
fruits and vegetables, would shrink considerably under this new diet, and
that change alone saved even more ener gy . These more modern ancestors,
Homo er ectus,  used it to grow an even bigger brain—an astounding 50
percent lar ger than those of our habilis  ancestors. W e began to look less like apes and more like people. If you could take
a Homo er ectus , dress him in a Brooks Brothers suit, and put him on a
subway , he probably wouldn’ t draw a second glance. These ancient
ancestors were genetically similar enough to possibly have our children. The innovation of mashing and cooking food, however , had
consequences. The quickly growing brain needed space to stretch out, and ittook it from the front of our faces, home to sinuses, mouths, and airways. Over time, muscles at the center of the face loosened, and bones in the jaw
weakened and grew thinner . The face shortened and the mouth shrank,
leaving behind a bony protuberance that replaced the squashed snout of our
ancestors. This new feature was ours alone and distinguished us from other
primates: the protruding nose. The problem was that this smaller , vertically positioned nose was less
ef ficient at filtering air , and it exposed us to more airborne pathogens and
bacteria. The smaller sinuses and mouth also reduced space in our throats. The more we cooked, the more soft, calorie-rich food we consumed, the
lar ger our brains grew and the tighter our airways became. —
Homo sapiens  first emer ged on the African savanna around 300,000 years
ago. W e were among a coterie of other human species: Homo
heidelber gensis , a robust creature who built shelters and hunted big game in
what is now Europe; Homo neanderthalensis  (Neanderthals), with their
massive noses and stunted limbs, who learned to make clothes and flourish
in frigid environments; and Homo naledi , a throwback to early ancestors,
with tiny brains, flared hips, and spindly arms that hung down from squat
bodies. What a sight it might have been, these ragtag species all gathered around
a blazing campfire at night, a Star W ars cantina of early humanity , sipping
river water from palm cups, picking grubs from each other ’ s hair ,
comparing the ridges of their brows, and scampering of f behind boulders to
have interspecies sex in the glow of starlight. Then, no more. The big-nosed Neanderthals, the scrawny naledi , the
thick-necked heidelber gensis  were all killed of f by disease, weather , each
other , or animals, or laziness, or something else. There was only one human
left in the long family tree: us. In colder climates, our noses would grow narrower and longer to more
ef ficiently heat up air before it entered our lungs; our skin would grow
lighter to take in more sunshine for production of vitamin D. In sunny and
warm environments, we adapted wider and flatter noses, which were more
ef ficient at inhaling hot and humid air; our skin would grow darker to
protect us from the sun. Along the way , the larynx would descend in the
throat to accommodate another adaptation: vocal communication.The larynx works as a valve to shuttle food into the stomach and protect
us from inhaling it and other objects. Every animal, and every other Homo
species, had evolved a higher larynx, located toward the top of the throat. This made sense, since a high larynx functions most ef ficiently , allowing
the body to rid itself quickly should anything get stuck in our airways. As humans developed speech, the larynx sank, opening up space in the
back of the mouth and allowing a wider range of vocalizations and
volumes. Smaller lips were easier to manipulate, and ours evolved to be
thinner and less bulbous. More nimble and flexible tongues made it easier
to control the nuance and structure of sounds, so the tongue slipped farther
down the throat and pushed the jaw forward. But this lowered larynx became less ef ficient at its original purpose. It
created too much space at the back of the mouth and made early humans
susceptible to choking. W e could choke if we swallowed something too big,
and we’d choke on smaller objects that were swallowed quickly and
sloppily . Sapiens  would become the only animals, and the only human
species, that could easily choke on food and die. Strangely , sadly , the same adaptations that would allow our ancestors to
outwit, outmaneuver , and outlive other animals—a mastery of fire and
processing food, an enormous brain, and the ability to communicate in a
vast range of sounds—would obstruct our mouths and throats and make it
much harder for us to breathe. This recessed growth would, much later ,
make us prone to choke on our own bodies when we slept: to snore. *
None of this mattered to the early humans, of course. For tens of
thousands of years, our ancestors would use their wildly developed heads to
breathe just fine. Armed with a nose, a voice, and a supersized brain,
humans took over the world. •       •       •
I’d been thinking about our hirsute forebears ever since I’d visited Evans
months back. There they were, crouched along the rocky African shore,
articulating the first vowels with their flexible lips, pulling in easy breaths
through gaping nasal apertures, and chomping on braised rabbit with perfect
teeth. And here I am, slack-jawed under an LED light, staring at W ikipedia’ s
Homo flor esiensis  page on my phone, chewing on bits of a low-carbnutritional bar with crooked teeth, coughing and wheezing and sucking
exactly no air through my obstructed nose. It’ s evening on the second day of the Stanford mouthbreathing
experiment, and I’m in bed with silicone plugs jammed inside my nasal
cavities, covered with tape. For the past few nights I’ve been splayed out in
a part of my house usually reserved for relatives and friends. I had a feeling
that my mouthbreathing lifestyle might be a challenge for my wife. L ying
here, tossing and turning, thinking about cavemen and unable to sleep, I’m
happy I moved. I’ve got a pulse oximeter device about the size of a matchbook strapped
to my wrist. There’ s a glowing red wire extending from it and wrapping
around my middle finger . Every few seconds, the device records my heart
rate and blood oxygen levels, using this information to assess how often and
how severely my too-deep tongue might get lodged in my too-small mouth
and cause me to hold my breath, a condition more commonly known as
sleep apnea. T o gauge the severity of my snoring and apnea, I’ve downloaded a
phone app that records a constant stream of audio through the night, then
provides a minute-to-minute graph of my breathing health every morning. A night vision security camera just above the bed monitors every
movement. Inflammation in the throat and polyps both contribute to snoring and
sleep apnea. Nasal obstruction triggers this nighttime choking as well, but
nobody knows how quickly the damage comes on, or how severe it might
become. Before now , nobody had tested it. Last night, in my first run of self-inflicted nasal obstructed sleeping, my
snoring increased by 1,300 percent, to 75 minutes through the night. Olsson’ s numbers were even worse. He went from zero to four hours, ten
minutes. I’d also suf fered a fourfold increase in sleep apnea events. All this,
in just 24 hours. Now , lying here again, no matter how I try to relax and submit to this
experiment, it’ s a challenge. Every 3.3 seconds another blast of unfiltered,
unmoistened, and unheated air enters through my mouth—drying my
tongue, irritating my throat, and pissing of f my lungs. And I’ve got 175,000
more breaths to go.Two
MOUTHBREATHING
It’ s 8:15 a.m., and Olsson bursts in, Kramer -style, through the side door of
the downstairs flat I’m in. “Good morning,” he shouts. He has little balls of
silicone lodged up his nose and is wearing cut-of f sweatpants and an
Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt. Olsson rented a studio apartment across the street from me for the
month, close enough to sneak over wearing his pajamas, but not close
enough to avoid looking like a freak doing it. His face, once tan and bright,
is now gaunt and sallow , and he looks like Gary Busey in that police
mugshot. He has the same spaced-out expression that he had yesterday; the
same haunted grin that he wore the day before and the day before that. T oday marks the halfway point of the mouthbreathing phase of the
experiment. And today , like every other day , as he’ s been doing three times
a day—morning, noon, and night—Olsson takes a seat across from me at
the table. One-two-thr ee , we flip on a pile of beeping and burping machines
lumped on the table, strap cuf fs to our arms, place EKG sensors on our ears,
stick thermometers in our mouths, and begin recording our physiological
data on spreadsheets. The data reveal what the previous days have revealed:
mouthbreathing is destroying our health. My blood pressure has spiked by an average of 13 points from where it
was before the test, which puts me deep into stage 1 hypertension. If left
unchecked, this state of chronically raised blood pressure, also shared by a
third of the U.S. population, can cause heart attacks, stroke, and other
serious problems. Meanwhile, my heart rate variability , a measure of
nervous system balance, has plummeted, suggesting that my body is in a
state of stress. Then there’ s my pulse, which has increased, and my bodytemperature, which has decreased, and my mental clarity , which has hit rock
bottom. Olsson’ s data mirror mine. But the worst part about all this is how we feel : awful. Every day it all
just seems to be getting worse. And every day , at this exact time, Olsson
finishes of f his last test, removes the respirator mask from his cotton-white
hair , stands up, and jams the silicone plugs a little deeper into his nostrils. He puts his sweatshirt back on and says, “I’ll meet you at ten-thirty ,” then
walks out the door . I nod and watch as he trots his slippered feet through the
hallways and back across the street. The final testing protocol, eating, happens alone. Through both phases
of the experiment, we’ll be eating the same food at the same time and
continuously recording our blood sugar levels while taking the same
amount of steps throughout the day to see how mouthbreathing and nasal
breathing might af fect weight and metabolism. T oday it’ s three eggs, half an
avocado, a piece of German brown bread, and a pot of Lapsang tea. Which
means that, ten days from now , I will again be sitting in this kitchen, eating
this same meal. After eating, I do the dishes, clean up used filters, pH strips, and Post-it
notes in the living room laboratory , and answer some emails. Sometimes
Olsson and I sit around and experiment with more comfortable and
ef fective ways to keep our noses blocked: waterproof earplugs (too hard),
foam earplugs (too soft), a swimmer ’ s nose clip (too painful), a CP AP nose
pillow (comfortable, but it looks like a bondage device), toilet paper (too
airy), chewing gum (too slimy), and, finally , sur gical tape over silicone or
foam earplugs, which is chafing and stifling but the least atrocious of the
options. But most of the time, all day , every day , for the past five days, Olsson
and I have just sat around alone in our apartments and hated life. I often feel
as though I’m trapped in some sad sitcom in which nobody laughs, a
Groundhog Day of perpetual and unending misery . —
Luckily , today is a little dif ferent. T oday , Olsson and I are going on a bike
ride. Not on a beach boardwalk or in the shadow of the Golden Gate, but
inside the concrete walls of a fluorescent-lit neighborhood gym. The cycling was Olsson’ s idea. He’d spent about ten years researching
the dif ferences in performance between nasal breathers and mouthbreathersduring intense exercise. He’d conducted his own studies on CrossFit
athletes, and he’d worked with coaches. He’d become convinced that
mouthbreathing can put the body into a state of stress that can make us
more quickly fatigued and sap athletic performance. He insisted that, for a
few days during each phase of the experiment, we saddle up on stationary
bikes and pedal to the edge of our aerobic capacity . The plan was to meet at
the gym at 10:15 a.m. I put on some shorts, grab the fitness tracker , an extra set of silicone
plugs, a water bottle, and exit through the backyard. W aiting by the fence is
Antonio, a contractor and longtime friend who has been doing renovation
work on an upper floor of my house. He looks over , and before I can make
a beeline for the garden exit, he notices the pink earplugs in my nose, drops
an armful of two-by-fours, and comes over to take a closer look. I’d known Antonio for 15 years and he’d heard about the oddball stories
in far -of f places I’d researched in the past. He’d always been interested and
supportive. That ended when I tell him about what I’ve been up to this
week. “This is a bad idea,” he says. “In school, when I was young, teachers
walked around the classroom, man, and pop-pop-pop .” He smacks the back
of his own head for emphasis. “Y ou’re breathing from your mouth, you get
pop ,” he says. Mouthbreathing leads to sickness and is disrespectful, he told
me, which is why he and everyone else he grew up with in Puebla, Mexico,
learned to breathe through the nose. Antonio told me his partner , Janet, suf fers from chronic obstruction and
runny nose. Janet’ s son, Anthony , is also a chronic mouthbreather . He’ s
starting to suf fer the same problems. “I keep telling them this is bad, they
try to fix it,” Antonio said. “But it’ s hard, man.”
I’d heard a similar story from an Indian-British man named David a few
days ago, when Olsson and I attempted our first nasal-obstructed jog along
the Golden Gate Bridge. David noticed our nasal bandages, stopped us, and
asked what we were doing. Then he told us how he’d had obstruction
problems all his life. “Always plugged or running, it never seemed to be,
you know , open,” he said. He’d spent the last 20 years squirting various
drugs up his nostrils, but they became less ef fective over time. Now he’d
developed chronic respiratory problems. T o avoid hearing more of these stories and to evade any more unwanted
attention, I’d learned to go outside only when I had to. Don’ t get me wrong:San Franciscans love weirdos. There was once a guy who used to walk
Haight Street with a hole in the back of his jeans so that his tail—an actual
human tail about five inches long—could swing freely behind him. He
hardly got second glances. But the sight of Olsson and me with plugs and tape and whatever else in
and around our noses has proven too much for locals to bear . Everywhere
we go, we get either questioned or somebody’ s long life story of breathing
woes, how he is congested, how her aller gies keep getting worse, how his
head hurts and sleep suf fers the worse his breathing seems to get. I wave goodbye to Antonio, pull the visor of the baseball cap a little
farther down to hide my plugged face and jog a few blocks to the gym. I
make my way around women speedwalking on treadmills and old men on
weight machines. I can’ t help noticing that all of them are mouthbreathing. Then I boot up the pulse oximeter , set the stop watch, hop on a
stationary bike, latch my feet into the pedals, and I’m of f.
The bike experiment is a repeat of several studies conducted 20 years
earlier by Dr . John Douillard, a trainer to elite athletes, from tennis star
Billie Jean King to triathletes to the New Jersey Nets. In the 1990s,
Douillard became convinced that mouthbreathing was hurting his clients. T o prove it, he gathered a group of professional cyclists, rigged them up
with sensors to record their heart rate and breathing rate, and put them on
stationary bikes. Over several minutes, Douillard increased the resistance
on the pedals, requiring the athletes to exert progressively more ener gy as
the experiment went on. During the first trial, Douillard told the athletes to breathe entirely
through their mouths. As the intensity increased, so did the rate of
breathing, which was expected. By the time athletes reached the hardest
stage of the test, pedaling out 200 watts of power , they were panting and
struggling to catch a breath. Then Douillard repeated the test while the athletes breathed through
their noses. As the intensity of exercise increased during this phase, the rate
of breathing decr eased . At the final, 200-watt stage, one subject who had
been mouthbreathing at a rate of 47 breaths per minute was nasal breathing
at a rate of 14 breaths a minute. He maintained the same heart rate at which
he’d started the test, even though the intensity of the exercise had increased
tenfold.Simply training yourself to breathe through your nose, Douillard
reported, could cut total exertion in half and of fer huge gains in endurance. The athletes felt invigorated while nasal breathing rather than exhausted. They all swore of f breathing through their mouths ever again. For the next 30 minutes on the stationary bike, I’ll follow Douillard’ s
test protocol, but instead of measuring exertion with weight, I’ll use
distance. I’ll keep my heart rate locked in to a consistent 136 beats per
minute while measuring how far I can go with my nose plugged and
breathing only from my mouth. Olsson and I will come back here over the
next several days, then return next week to repeat the test while breathing
only through our noses. This data will provide a general overview of how
these two breathing channels af fect endurance and ener gy ef ficiency . —
T o understand how breathing af fects athletic performance, we first need to
understand how the body makes ener gy from air and food. There are two
options: with oxygen, a process known as aerobic respiration, and without
it, which is called anaerobic respiration. Anaerobic ener gy is generated only with glucose (a simple sugar), 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
ener gy is inef ficient and can be toxic, creating an excess of lactic acid. The
nausea, muscle weakness, and sweating you experience after you’ve pushed
it too hard at the gym is the feeling of anaerobic overload. This process
explains why the first few minutes of an intense workout are often so
miserable. Our lungs and respiratory system haven’ t caught up to supply the
oxygen our bodies need, and so the body has to use anaerobic respiration. This also explains why , after we’re warmed up, exercise feels easier . The
body has switched from anaerobic to aerobic respiration. These two ener gies are made in dif ferent muscle fibers throughout the
body . Because anaerobic respiration is intended as a backup system, our
bodies are built with fewer anaerobic muscle fibers. If we rely on these less-
developed muscles too often, they eventually break down. More injuries
occur during the post–New Y ear ’ s rush to gyms than at any other time of
the year , because too many people attempt to exercise far over their
thresholds. Essentially , anaerobic ener gy 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 of f an explosion
of life? W e’ve got some 37 trillion of them in our bodies. When we run our
cells aerobically with oxygen, we gain some 16 times more ener gy
ef ficiency over anaerobic. The key for exercise, and for the rest of life, is to
stay in that ener gy-ef ficient, clean-burning, oxygen-eating aerobic zone for
the vast majority of time during exercise and at all times during rest. Back in the gym, I pedal a little harder , breathe a little deeper , and watch
as my heart rate increases steadily , from 112 to 114 and on up. Over the
next three minutes of warm-up, I need to get to 136 then keep it there for a
half hour . This rate should be right at the aerobic/anaerobic threshold for a
man my age. In the 1970s, Phil Maf fetone, a top fitness coach who worked with
Olympians, ultramarathoners, and triathletes, discovered that most
standardized workouts could be more injurious than beneficial to athletes. The reason is that everybody is dif ferent, and everybody will react to
training. Busting out a hundred pushups may be great for one person but
harmful to another . Maf fetone personalized his training to focus on the
more subjective metric of heart rates, which ensured that his athletes stayed
inside a defined aerobic zone, and that they burned more fat, recovered
faster , and came back the next day—and the next year—to do it again. Finding the best heart rate for exercise is easy: subtract your age from
180. The result is the maximum your body can withstand to stay in the
aerobic state. Long bouts of training and exercise can happen below this
rate but never above it, otherwise the body will risk going too deep into the
anaerobic zone for too long. Instead of feeling invigorated and strong after a
workout, you’d feel tired, shaky , and nauseated. Which is basically what happens to me. After I do a half hour of
vigorous pedaling and openmouthed huf fing, the clock on the stationary
bike ticks down to zero and the whirling gears slow to a stop. I’m sweating
profusely and feel bleary-eyed, but I’ve pedaled a total of only 6.44 miles. I
scoot of f the bike and let Olsson take a spin, then it’ s back to the home lab
for a shower , a glass of water , and more testing. •       •       •Decades before Olsson and I jammed our noses shut, and before Douillard
put his cyclists through the rounds, scientists were running their own tests
on the pros and cons of mouthbreathing. There was Austen Y oung, an enterprising doctor in England who, in the
1960s, treated a slew of chronic nose-bleeders by sewing their nostrils shut. One of Y oung’ s followers, V alerie J. Lund, revived the procedure in the
1990s and stitched the nostrils of dozens of patients. I repeatedly tried to
contact Lund to ask how her mouthbreathing patients fared after weeks,
months, and years, but never got a reply .
_OceanofPDF.com_Breath_-_James_Nestor.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Also by James Nestor
Deep: Fr eediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean T ells Us about
OurselvesR I V E R H E A D  B O O K S
A n  i m p r i n t  o f  P e n g u i n  R a n d o m  H o u s e  L L C
p e n g u i n r a n d o m h o u s e. c o m
C o p y r i g h t  ©  2 0 2 0  b y  J a m e s  N e s t o r
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c u l t u r e. T h a n k  y o u  f o r  b u y i n g  a n  a u t h o r i z e d  e d i t i o n  o f  t h i s  b o o k  a n d  f o r  c o m p l y i n g  w i t h  c o p y r i g h t  l a w s  b y  n o t  r e p r o d u c i n g,
s c a n n i n g,  o r  d i s t r i b u t i n g  a n y  p a r t  o f  i t  i n  a n y  f o r m  w i t h o u t  p e r m i s s i o n. Y o u  a r e  s u p p o r t i n g  w r i t e r s  a n d  a l l o w i n g  P e n g u i n  t o
c o n t i n u e  t o  p u b l i s h  b o o k s  f o r  e v e r y  r e a d e r. R i v e r h e a d  a n d  t h e  R  c o l o p h o n  a r e  r e g i s t e r e d  t r a d e m a r k s  o f  P e n g u i n  R a n d o m  H o u s e  L L C. L i b r a r y  o f  C o n g r e s s  C a t a l o g i n g - i n - P u b l i c a t i o n  D a t a
N a m e s :  N e s t o r,  J a m e s,  a u t h o r. T i t l e :  B r e a t h  :  t h e  n e w  s c i e n c e  o f  a  l o s t  a r t  /  J a m e s  N e s t o r. D e s c r i p t i o n :  N e w  Y o r k  :  R i v e r h e a d  B o o k s,  2 0 2 0. |  I n c l u d e s  b i b l i o g r a p h i c a l  r e f e r e n c e s  a n d  i n d e x. I d e n t i f i e r s :  L C C N  2 0 1 9 0 5 0 8 6 3  ( p r i n t )  |  L C C N  2 0 1 9 0 5 0 8 6 4  ( e b o o k )  |  I S B N  9 7 8 0 7 3 5 2 1 3 6 1 6  ( h a r d c o v e r )  |  I S B N  9 7 8 0 7 3 5 2 1 3 6 3 0
( e b o o k )
S u b j e c t s :  L C S H :  B r e a t h i n g  e x e r c i s e s. |  R e s p i r a t i o n. C l a s s i f i c a t i o n :  L C C  R A 7 8 2. N 4 7  2 0 2 0  ( p r i n t )  |  L C C  R A 7 8 2  ( e b o o k )  |  D D C  6 1 3 /. 1 9 2 — d c 2 3
L C  r e c o r d  a v a i l a b l e  a t  h t t p s : / / l c c n. l o c. g o v / 2 0 1 9 0 5 0 8 6 3
L C  e b o o k  r e c o r d  a v a i l a b l e  a t  h t t p s : / / l c c n.
James Nestor
Who is the author of the book "Breathe"?
The book explores the lost art and science of breathing, discussing its importance in our daily lives and its potential to affect our overall health and well-being.
What is the main focus of the book "Breathe"?
The goal of the experiment is to test the effects of mouthbreathing on the body, as well as the benefits of nasal breathing.
What is the main goal of the experiment in the book?
Dr. Jayakar Nayak is a rhinologist, and he is the chief of rhinology research at Stanford.
Who is Dr. Jayakar Nayak, and what is his profession?
The book argues that the way we breathe has a profound impact on our health and well-being, and that the current mouthbreathing habits of modern humans are detrimental to our overall health.
What is the main argument of the book "Breathe"?