But he too was universally ignored, and
often ridiculed. After one lecture at his alma mater , several colleagues
claimed he had faked his data and Photoshopped his X-rays. “Y ou cannot
grow bone past 30,” they reprimanded him, time and again. Belfor and Corruccini are still waiting for their Mew moment, when the
establishment starts to come around. In the meantime, I’ve come around. Exactly a year to the week after I began wearing Belfor ’ s retainer , I
visited a private radiology clinic in downtown San Francisco and had my
airways, sinuses, and mouth rescanned. Belfor sent the results to
AnalyzeDirect at the Mayo Clinic to study what had happened to my face
and airways. The results were stunning. I had gained 1,658 cubic millimeters of new
bone in my cheeks and right eye socket, the equivalent volume of five
pennies. I’d also added 118 cubic millimeters of bone along my nose, and
178 along my upper jaw . My jaw position became better aligned and
balanced. My airways widened and became firmer . The deposit of pus and
granulation that had accumulated in my maxillary sinuses, likely the result
of mild chronic obstruction, was completely gone.Sure, it took weeks to get used to having a chunk of plastic in my mouth
at night. Spit built up, my throat constricted, and my teeth ached. But like
most discomforts in life, it got easier and less annoying the longer I did it. As I write this, because of chewing and some widening of my palate, I
am breathing more easily and freely than I ever remember . Other than that
week and a half in which I purposely obstructed my nose in the Stanford
experiment, I have suf fered only one stuf fy nose this year , when I came
down with a cold. Even with my messed-up, middle-aged mouth and face,
I’d managed to make real progress. *
“Nature seeks homeostasis and balance,” Belfor told me on the phone in
one of our dozens of conversations since we first met. “Y ou were out of
balance. Just look at the scans. Nature corrected you by adding a
tremendous amount of bone to your face—the proof is in the pudding.”
This is what I learned at the end of this long and very strange trip
through the causes and cures of airway obstruction. That our noses and
mouths are not predetermined at birth, childhood, or even in adulthood. W e
can reverse the clock on much of the damage that’ s been done in the past
few hundred years by force of will, with nothing more than proper posture,
hard chewing, and perhaps some mewing. And with the obstruction out of the way , we can finally get back to
breathing.Part Three
BREATHING+Eight
MORE, ON OCCASION
The morning after our celebratory “last” supper , Olsson and I hop back in
my car and drive down to Stanford for our final inspection with Dr . Nayak. W e are rescanned, reprodded, repoked, and repeppered with questions. The
same tests we ran through ten days ago, and ten days before that. The data
for both stages of the experiment, we’re told, will be available later this
month. W e are free to breathe, free to go. For Olsson, that means heading back to Sweden. For me, it means
further exploration to the outer limits of breath. •       •       •
The techniques I’ll pursue from this point forward will not hold to the slow-
and-steady style. They are not  accessible to everyone, everywhere. Y ou
can’ t practice them while flipping through the pages of this book. Several
take a long time to master , require concerted ef fort, and can be
uncomfortable. Pulmonary medicine has many scary names for what these more
extreme techniques can do to the body and mind: respiratory acidosis,
alkalosis, hypocapnia, sympathetic nervous system overload, extreme
apnea. Under normal circumstances, these conditions are considered
damaging and would require medical care. But something else happens when we practice these techniques
willingly , when we consciously push our bodies into these states for a few
minutes, or hours, a day . In some cases, they can radically transform lives.Collectively , I’m calling these potent techniques Breathing+, because
they build on the foundation of practices I described earlier in this book,
and because many require extra focus and of fer extra rewards. Some
involve breathing really fast for a very long time; others require breathing
very slow for even longer . A few entail not breathing at all for a few
minutes. These methods, too, date back thousands of years, vanished, then
were rediscovered again at a dif ferent time in a dif ferent culture, renamed
and redeployed. At best, Breathing+ can of fer a deeper view into the secrets of our most
basic biological function. At worst, breathing this way can provoke heavy
sweats, nausea, and exhaustion. This, I would learn, is all part of the
process. It’ s the respiratory gauntlet required to get to the other side. •       •       •
As unlikely as it sounds, the first Breathing+ technique I’ll explore emer ged
in the W estern world on Civil W ar battlefields. It was 1862 and Jacob Mendez Da Costa had just arrived at T urner ’ s
Lane Hospital in Philadelphia. The Union Army had suf fered a humiliating
defeat at Fredericksbur g, V ir ginia, where twelve hundred men had been
killed and more than 9,000 wounded. Soldiers were laid out in the hallways,
bruised and bleeding on rows of cots, missing ears, fingers, arms, and legs. Even those who hadn’ t seen military action were falling apart. They
came into the hospital in droves, complaining of anxiety and paranoia,
headaches, diarrhea, dizziness, and shooting pain in their chests. They
sighed a lot. When the men tried to breathe, they’d huf f and huf f, but would
never feel like they could catch a breath. These men showed no signs of
physical damage; they had spent weeks or months preparing for battle but
never saw any action. Nothing had happened  to them. And yet each was
incapacitated, hobbling beneath the whitewashed walls of the hospital, past
the rows of screaming and suf fering amputees, trying to find their way into
Da Costa’ s care. Da Costa was a glum-looking man with a bald head, lambchop
sideburns, and tired, Portuguese eyes. He’d been born on the island of St.
Thomas and spent years studying medicine in Europe with leading
sur geons. He’d become a renowned expert in the maladies of the heart andhad treated scores of men with myriad ailments. But he’d never seen
anything like the soldiers at T urner ’ s Lane. He started the examinations by lifting the men’ s shirts and placing a
stethoscope to their chests. The soldiers’ heartbeats were manic, thumping
up to 200 beats per minute, even though they were sitting still. Some
breathed 30 or more times a minute, double the normal pace. One typical patient was W illiam C., a 21-year -old farmer who, after
deployment, developed vicious diarrhea and a bluish tint to his hands. He
complained of breathlessness. Henry H. had identical symptoms and shared
W illiam C.’ s skinny build, with a narrow chest and a stooped spine. He too
had enlisted in good health, then, without explanation, was immobilized. “The man did not look sick,” wrote Da Costa. But his heart rate was “of
irregular rhythm, some beats following each other in rapid succession.”
Hundreds of men would come to see Da Costa over the next few years,
with the same cluster of complaints, the same backstory . Da Costa would
call the malady Irritable Heart Syndrome. The syndrome was puzzling in another way: the symptoms came on, and
then they would disappear . A few days, weeks, or months of rest and
relaxation, and heartbeats would soften, digestive problems would abate. The men became normal again and they’d breathe normally again, too. Most would be sent back to war . The few still suf fering would be placed in
the “invalid corps” or shipped home to deal with the syndrome for the rest
of their lives. Da Costa recorded reams of data on these men, and he released a formal
clinical study in 1871, which would become a landmark in the history of
cardiovascular disease. But Irritable Heart Syndrome wasn’ t confined to just the Civil W ar . The
same symptoms would show up half a century later in 20 percent of soldiers
who fought in W orld W ar I, a million soldiers in W orld W ar II, and
hundreds of thousands more in V ietnam and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Doctors dreamed up new names for these problems along the way ,
believing they had discovered a new kind of illness. They told soldiers they
suf fered from shell shock, soldier ’ s heart, post-V ietnam syndrome, and
post-traumatic stress disorder . They considered the ailments to be
psychological, some disturbance in the brain brought on by fighting. Soldiers often blamed exposure to chemicals or vaccines, although nobody
really knew for sure.Da Costa had his own theories. At T urner ’ s Hospital, he suspected he
was dealing with, in his words, “a disorder of the sympathetic nervous
system.”
It is the same disorder I’m feeling right now . •       •       •
It’ s late morning and I’m splayed out on a yoga mat on the parched lawn of
a roadside public park in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. There’ s a picnic table full of emer gency medical technicians eating lunch to
my right, an old man brown-bagging a tallboy beer on a bench to my left. Above me, the autumn sun is so clear and bright that it’ s blinding, even
through squinted eyes. I take a huge, heaving breath into the pit of my
abdomen and let it out. I’ve been doing this for the past few minutes, and I
can feel beads of sweat erupting on my forehead and face. I’ve got another
half hour to go. “T wenty more!” yells the man standing over me. I can barely hear him
through the thunder of big rigs shifting gears on the highway behind us. His
name is Chuck McGee III, and he’ s a big dude with a sandy bowl cut,
rainbow-lensed blade glasses, and car go shorts that dangle just a few inches
above white socks and dirt-baked sneakers. I’ve hired him for the day to
help me redline my sympathetic nervous system with overbreathing. So far it’ s working. My heart is beating violently . It feels like there’ s a
rodent loose in my chest. I feel anxious and paranoid, sweaty and
claustrophobic. This must be the sympathetic overload. This must be Irritable Heart
Syndrome coming on. —
Breathing, as it happens, is more than just a biochemical or physical act; it’ s
more than just moving the diaphragm downward and sucking in air to feed
hungry cells and remove wastes. The tens of billions of molecules we bring
into our bodies with every breath also serve a more subtle, but equally
important role. They influence nearly every internal or gan, telling them
when to turn on and of f. They af fect heart rate, digestion, moods, attitudes;
when we feel aroused, and when we feel nauseated. Breathing is a power
switch to a vast network called the autonomic nervous system.There are two sections of this system, and they serve opposite functions. Each is essential to our well-being. The first, called the parasympathetic nervous system, stimulates
relaxation and restoration. The mellow buzz you get during a long massage
or the sleepiness you feel after a big meal happens because the
parasympathetic nervous system sends signals to your stomach to digest
and to the brain to pump feel-good hormones such as serotonin and
oxytocin into your bloodstream. Parasympathetic stimulation opens the
floodgates in our eyes and makes tears flow at weddings. It prompts
salivation before meals, loosens the bowels to eliminate waste, and
stimulates the genitals before sex. For these reasons, it’ s sometimes called
the “feed and breed” system. The lungs are covered with nerves that extend to both sides of the
autonomic nervous system, and many of the nerves connecting to the
parasympathetic system are located in the lower lobes, which is one reason
long and slow breaths are so relaxing. As molecules of breath descend
deeper , they switch on parasympathetic nerves, which send more messages
for the or gans to rest and digest. As air ascends through the lungs during
exhalation, the molecules stimulate an even more powerful parasympathetic
response. The deeper and more softly we breathe in, and the longer we
exhale, the more slowly the heart beats and the calmer we become. People
have evolved to spend the majority of waking hours—and all of our
sleeping hours—in this state of recovery and relaxation. Chilling out helped
make us human. The second half of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic, has
an opposite role. It sends stimulating signals to our or gans, telling them to
get ready for action. A profusion of the nerves to this system are spread out
at the top of the lungs. When we take short, hasty breaths, the molecules of
air switch on the sympathetic nerves. These work like 911 calls. The more
messages the system gets, the bigger the emer gency . That negative ener gy you feel when someone cuts you of f in traf fic or
wrongs you at work is the sympathetic system ramping up. In these states,
the body redirects blood flow from less-vital or gans like the stomach and
bladder and sends it to the muscles and brain. Heart rate increases,
adrenaline kicks in, blood vessels constrict, pupils dilate, palms sweat, the
mind sharpens. Sympathetic states help ease pain and keep blood fromdraining out if we get injured. They make us meaner and leaner , so we can
fight harder or run faster when confronted with danger . But our bodies are built to stay in a state of heightened sympathetic alert
only for short bursts, and only on occasion. Although sympathetic stress
takes just a second to activate, turning it of f and returning to a state of
relaxation and restoration can take an hour or more. It’ s what makes food
dif ficult to digest after an accident, and why men have trouble getting
erections and women often can’ t experience or gasms when they’re angry . *
For all these reasons, it seems odd and counterintuitive to willingly
place yourself in an extended state of extreme sympathetic stress, and to do
this every day . Why make yourself light-headed, anxious, and flaccid? And
yet, for centuries, the ancients developed and practiced breathing techniques
that did just this. •       •       •
The stress-inducing breathing method that brought me to this roadside
public park is called Inner Fire Meditation, and it’ s been practiced by
T ibetan Buddhists and their students for the past thousand years. Its history
begins around the tenth century AD , when a 28-year -old Indian man named
Naropa got bored with domestic life. He divorced his wife, packed a bag,
and walked northeast until he was surrounded by stone towers, pavilions,
temples, and blue lotus trees. This dazzling place was Buddhist University
Nalanda, and thousands of scholars from throughout the East gathered there
to study astronomy , astrology , and holistic medicine. A few sought
enlightenment. Naropa excelled in his courses, mastering the lessons of Sutra and the
secret techniques of T antra, which had been handed down from one master
to another over the millennia. He set out into the Himalayas to put
everything he’d learned into practice, living inside a cave on the banks of
the Bagmati River in what is now Kathmandu, Nepal. The cave was cold. Naropa harnessed the power of his breath to keep himself from freezing to
death. The practice became known as T ummo, the T ibetan word for “inner
fire.”
T ummo was dangerous. If used incorrectly , it could elicit intense sur ges
of ener gy , which could cause serious mental harm. For that reason, it wasreserved only for advanced monks and stayed in the Himalayas, locked up
in the T ibetan monasteries for the next thousand years. Fast-forward to the early 1900s, when a Belgian-French anarchist and
former opera singer was making her way up to T ibet with soot on her face,
yak fur woven into her hair , and a red belt around her head. Her name was
Alexandra David-Néel, and she was in her mid-40s traveling alone through
India—unheard-of at the time for a W estern woman. David-Néel had spent most of her life exploring dif ferent philosophies
and religions. As a teenager , she’d hung out with mystics, starved herself,
beaten herself, and followed diets used by ascetic saints. She was into
Freemasonry and feminism and free love. But it was Buddhism that really
fascinated her . She taught herself Sanskrit, then set out on a spiritual
pilgrimage through India and T ibet that lasted 14 years. Along the way she
happened into a cave high in the Himalayas, just as Naropa had done. It was
there that a T ibetan holy man passed down the instructions for the
superheating power of T ummo. “[T ummo was] but a way devised by the Thibetan hermits of enabling
themselves to live without endangering their health on the high hills,” wrote
David-Néel. “It has nothing to do with religion, and so it can be used for
ordinary purposes without lack of reverence.” David-Néel would rely on the
practice over and over again to keep happy , healthy , and heated as she hiked
for 19 hours a day in freezing temperatures without food or water , at
elevations above 18,000 feet. —
“T wo more, make them good,” says McGee. I can’ t see him—my eyes are
still squinted—but I can hear him, heavy-breathing alongside me, cheering
me on. I take another giant inhale, then roll the air up to my chest and
exhale, like a wave. I’ve been doing this for what feels like five minutes. My hands are tingling and my intestines feel like they’re slowly uncoiling. I
let out an uncontrolled moan. “Y es!” McGee cheers. “Expression is the opposite of depression! Go for
it!”
I moan a little louder , wiggle my body , and breathe a little harder . For a
moment, I get self-conscious thinking about the EMT s and the ruddy-faced
drunk nearby , who no doubt are watching the spectacle: the middle-agedcity boys hyperventilating on a purple BP A-free yoga mat, both of us
sounding like dedicated perverts. This self-expression is an important part of T ummo, McGee said before
we started. It reminds me that the stress I’m creating is dif ferent from the
stress of, say , running late for an important meeting. It is conscious stress. “This is something you are doing to yourself—not something happening to
you!” McGee keeps yelling. The stress that Da Costa’ s soldiers experienced was unconscious. The
men had grown up in rural environments, outside the noise and crowds of
the city . The more carnage they saw , the more their unconscious
sympathetic responses kept building with no means of release. Eventually ,
their nervous systems were so overloaded that they short-circuited and
collapsed. I don’ t want to short-circuit. I want to condition myself so I can remain
flexible to the constant pressures of modern life. “Keep going,” says McGee. “Get it all out!”
Professional surfers, mixed martial arts fighters, and Navy SEALs use
T ummo-style breathing to get into the zone before a competition or black
ops mission. It’ s also especially useful for middle-aged people who suf fer
from lower -grade stress, aches and pains, and slowing metabolisms. For
them—for me—T ummo can be a preventative therapy , a way to get a
fraying nervous system back on track and keep it there. Simpler and less intense methods of breathing slow , less, through the
nose with a big exhale, can also dif fuse stress and restore balance. These
techniques can be life-changing, and I’d seen dozens of people changed by
them. But they can also take a while, especially for those with long-
standing chronic conditions. Sometimes the body needs more than a soft nudge to get realigned. Sometimes it needs a violent shove. That’ s what T ummo does. •       •       •
That shove is still perplexing to the few scientists paying close attention to
such phenomena. They ask: How exactly can conscious extreme breathing
hack into the autonomic nervous system? Dr . Stephen Por ges, a scientist and professor of psychiatry at the
University of North Carolina, has studied the nervous system and itsresponse to stress for the past 30 years. His primary focus is the vagus
nerve, a meandering network within the system that connects to all the
major internal or gans. The vagus nerve is the power lever; it’ s what turns
or gans on and of f in response to stress. When perceived stress level is very high, the vagus nerve slows heart
rate, circulation, and or gan functions. This is how our reptilian and
mammalian ancestors evolved the ability to “play dead” hundreds of
millions of years ago, to conserve ener gy and deflect aggression when
under attack by predators. Reptiles still access this ability , as do many
mammals. (Imagine the limp body of a mouse in the jaws of a house cat.) People “play dead,” too, because we share the same mechanisms in the
primitive part of our brain stem. W e call it fainting. Our tendency to faint is
controlled by the vagal system, specifically how sensitive we are to
perceived danger . Some people are so anxious and oversensitive that their
vagus nerves will cause them to faint at the smallest things, like seeing a
spider , hearing bad news, or looking at blood. Most of us aren’ t that sensitive. It’ s much more common, especially in
the modern world, to never experience full-blown, life-threatening stress,
but to never fully relax either . W e’ll spend our days half-asleep and nights
half-awake, lolling in a gray zone of half-anxiety . When we do, the vagus
nerve stays half-stimulated. During these times, the or gans throughout the body won’ t be “shut
down,” but will instead be half supported in a state of suspended animation:
blood flow will decrease and communication between the or gans and the
brain will become choppy , like a conversation through a staticky phone line. Our bodies can persist like this for a while; they can keep us alive, but they
can’ t keep us healthy . Por ges found that patients who suf fer Da Costa–like maladies such as
tingling in their fingers, chronic diarrhea, rapid heart rate, diabetes, and
erectile dysfunction are often treated for each of these symptoms with a
focus on individual or gans. But there’ s nothing wrong with their stomachs,
hearts, or genitals. What they often suf fer from are communication
problems along the vagal and autonomic network, brought on by chronic
stress. T o some researchers, it’ s no coincidence that eight of the top ten
most common cancers af fect or gans cut of f from normal blood flow during
extended states of stress.Fixing the autonomic nervous system can ef fectively cure or lessen
these symptoms. In the past decade, sur geons have implanted electrical
nodes in patients that work as an artificial vagal nerve to restart blood flow
and communication between or gans. The procedure is called vagus nerve
stimulation, and it’ s highly ef fective for patients suf fering from anxiety ,
depression, and autoimmune diseases. But there is another , less invasive way Por ges found to stimulate the
vagus nerve: breathing. Breathing is an autonomic function we can consciously control. While
we can’ t simply decide when to slow or speed up our heart or digestion, or
to move blood from one or gan to another , we can choose how and when to
breathe. W illing ourselves to breathe slowly will open up communication
along the vagal network and relax us into a parasympathetic state. Breathing really fast and heavy on purpose flips the vagal response the
other way , shoving us into a stressed state. It teaches us to consciously
access the autonomic nervous system and control it, to turn on heavy stress
specifically so that we can turn it of f and spend the rest of our days and
nights relaxing and restoring, feeding and breeding. “Y ou are not  the passenger ,” McGee keeps yelling at me. “Y ou are the
pilot!”
—
This was supposed to be biologically impossible. The autonomic nervous
system, per its definition, was supposed to be autonomic, as in automatic, as
in beyond our control. And for the past hundred years or so, this belief has
held. In much of medicine, it still holds today . When Alexandra David-Néel finally returned to Paris and wrote about
T ummo and other Buddhist breathing techniques and meditations in her
1927 book, My Journey to Lhasa , few doctors and medical researchers
believed the stories. Few could accept that breathing alone could keep a
body warm in freezing temperatures. Fewer believed it could control
immune function and heal diseases. Through the twentieth century , interest in T ummo grew , and a flood of
anthropologists, researchers, and seekers traveled to the Himalayas and
came back reporting the same feats that David-Néel had been talking about. They told stories of monks wearing nothing but a single layer of clothes
throughout the winter , heating themselves in frigid stone monasteries byday and melting circles in the snow around their bare bodies by night. Eventually , a Harvard Medical School researcher named Herbert Benson
thought it might be time to put T ummo to the test. Benson flew to the Himalayas in 1981, recruited three monks, hooked
them up to sensors that measured the temperature in their fingers and toes,
and then asked them to practice T ummo breathing. During the practice, the
temperature in the monks’ extremities went up by as much as 17 degrees
Fahrenheit and stayed there. The results were published the next year in the
esteemed scientific journal Natur e.
The videos and photographs taken during the Harvard experiments
showed short men with satchels wrapped around flabby waists, their skin
covered in a thick sheen of sweat, eyes half-closed and lost in a thousand-
mile stare. The experiments added credence to what DavidNéel and Naropa
and described, and yet Benson’ s monks seemed even stranger than an
anarchist opera singer or ancient mystic. It all seemed totally inaccessible to
W esterners. That would change by the early 2000s, when a Dutch man named W im
Hof ran a half-marathon through the snow above the Arctic Circle shirtless
and in bare feet. Here was a W esterner who had a beard, thinning lead-
colored hair , and a face pulled from a Bruegel painting. In short, he looked
like every other middle-aged Northern European male. Hof hadn’ t grown
up in a cave in India or suf fered from tuberculosis in a village hospital. He’d worked as a mail carrier and was a father of four . Y ears earlier , Hof ’ s wife had taken her own life after years of
depression. He had sought refuge from his pain by deepening his practice of
yoga, meditation, and breathing practices. He unearthed the ancient
technique of T ummo, honed it, simplified it, repackaged it for mass
consumption, and began promoting its powers in a string of daredevil stunts
that would have been quickly discounted if the media hadn’ t been around to
verify them. Hof submer ged himself in a bath filled with ice for an hour and 52
minutes, and he suf fered no hypothermia or frostbite. Then he ran a full
marathon in the Namib desert in temperatures that reached 104, without
ever sipping a drop of water . Over the span of a decade, Hof broke 26 world records, each more
baf fling than the last. These stunts earned him international fame, and hissmiling, frost-covered face soon appeared on dozens of magazine covers, in
flashy documentary specials, and in a handful of books. “W im violated the rules laid out in medical textbooks so drastically
scientists had to pay attention,” said Andrew Huberman, a professor of
neurobiology at Stanford University . Scientists paid attention. In 2011, researchers at Radboud University Medical Center in the
Netherlands brought Hof into a laboratory and started poking and prodding
him, trying to figure out how he did what he did. At one point, they injected
his arm with an endotoxin, a component of E. coli . Exposure to the bacteria
usually induces vomiting, headaches, fever , and other flu-like symptoms. Hof took the E. coli  into his veins and then breathed a few dozen T ummo
breaths, willing his body to fight it of f. He showed no sign of fever , no
nausea. A few minutes later , he rose from the chair and got a cup of cof fee. Hof insisted he wasn’ t special; neither were David-Néel or the T ibetan
monks. Almost anyone could do what they all did. As Hof put it, we just
had to “Breathe, motherfucker!”
He proved his point three years later , when Radboud University
researchers brought in two dozen healthy male volunteers and randomly
split them into two groups. Half the men spent the next ten days learning
Hof ’ s version of T ummo while exposing themselves to cold, doing things
like playing soccer shirtless in snow . The control group received no
training. The two groups were brought back into the lab. Each was hooked
up to monitors, then injected with the E. coli  endotoxin. The group trained by Hof were able to control their heart rate,
temperature, and immune response, and stimulate the sympathetic system. This practice of heavy breathing along with regular cold exposure was later
discovered to release the stress hormones adrenaline, cortisol, and
norepinephrine on command. The burst of adrenaline gave heavy breathers
ener gy and released a battery of immune cells programmed to heal wounds,
fight of f pathogens and infection. The huge spike in cortisol helped
downgrade short-term inflammatory immune responses, while a squirt of
norepinephrine redirected blood flow from the skin, stomach, and
reproductive or gans to muscles, the brain, and other areas essential in
stressful situations. T ummo heated the body and opened up the brain’ s pharmacy , flooding
the bloodstream with self-produced opioids, dopamine, and serotonin. All
that, with just a few hundred quick and heavy breaths.•       •       •
“One more,” says McGee. “Then let it all out and hold.”
I do as instructed, and listen as the rushing wind that was pouring
through my lungs suddenly stops and is replaced by pure silence, the kind
of jarring quietude a skydiver feels the moment a parachute opens. But this
stillness is coming from inside. As I hold my breath longer , I feel a
comforting heat spread across my body and face. I focus on my heart, rock
to its vibrations. Each thump sounds and feels like the kick drum from the
beginning of Black Sabbath’ s “Iron Man.”
“Make the silence between your heartbeats last an eternity ,” McGee says
in a soothing voice. After a minute or so, McGee directs me to take in a huge breath without
exhaling, and to hold it again for 15 seconds, gently moving the air around
my chest. At his order , I exhale and the cycle starts all over again “Three
more rounds,” McGee says, his voice raising to a yell. “Be your own
superpower!”
As I’m huf fing again, I slide my focus to McGee, my cheerleader . He’d
told me earlier how he’d been suddenly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes six
years ago, at 33. His pancreas shut down and no longer produced insulin. Then he suf fered chronic back pain, making him anxious and severely
depressed. His blood pressure shot up. McGee’ s doctor gave him insulin injections to help stabilize his blood
sugar , enalapril to lower his blood pressure, and V alium to ease the pain. “I
was also taking four or five ibuprofen every day ,” he said. But nothing
really helped. He only got sicker . McGee was like 15 percent of the American population—more than 50
million people—who suf fer from an autoimmune disorder . In simple terms,
these diseases are the result of an immune system that goes rogue and starts
attacking healthy tissues. Joints become inflamed, muscles and nerve fibers
waste away , rashes cover the skin. These ailments go by many names:
rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto’ s disease, type 1
diabetes. Pharmaceutical treatments, such as immunosuppressants, work by
easing symptoms and keeping the patient more comfortable, but they do
nothing to address the core malfunction in the body . Autoimmune diseases
have no known cure, and even the causes are debated. An increasing bodyof research has shown that many are tied to dysfunction of the autonomic
nervous system. McGee’ s awareness of alternative treatments began when a friend
mentioned a short feature on someone named “the Ice Man” on V ice TV ,
the news and culture network. That night McGee tried W im Hof ’ s heavy
breathing technique. “For the first time in a long time, I slept peacefully ,”
he told me. He signed up for Hof ’ s ten-week video course, and within
weeks watched as his insulin levels normalized, pain subsided, and blood
pressure plunged. He quit taking enalapril and reduced his insulin intake by
around 80 percent. He still took ibuprofen, but only a pill or two once a
week. McGee was hooked. He flew to Poland to attend an instructor retreat
with Hof, where he and a dozen other students spent two weeks hiking up
snowy mountains and swimming in freezing lakes. They breathed a lot. It
never felt like a competition, McGee told me, or like some extreme fitness
regimen. “Fight it. No pain, no gain. That’ s all bullshit. That’ s how you get
hurt,” McGee explained. The point was to rebalance the body so that it
could do what it is naturally adapted to do. I’d heard dozens of these stories. Men, mainly in their 20s, who’d
suddenly been diagnosed with arthritis and psoriasis or depression, who,
weeks after practicing heavy breathing, no longer suf fered any symptoms. T wenty thousand others in Hof ’ s community exchange blood work data and
other metrics of their transformations online. The before-and-after results
confirmed their claims. Some of these people were reducing inflammatory
markers (C-reactive protein) 40-fold within just a few weeks. “Doctors say this is more pseudoscience than science, that there’ s no
way any of this can be true,” McGee told me. And yet McGee and
thousands of other heavy breathers kept showing profound improvements. They kept getting of f medications they’d been on for years. They kept
heating and healing themselves. “Y ou cannot copyright breathing, that’ s part of it, and you can’ t fault
someone for the way they’ve learned,” said McGee. “All you can do is give
information.”
•       •       •Here’ s the information: T o practice W im 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. T ake 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. Y ou 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. V ery 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. This flip-flopping—breathing all-out, then not at all, getting really cold
and then hot again—is the key to T ummo’ s magic. It forces the body into
high stress one minute, a state of extreme relaxation the next. Carbon
dioxide levels in the blood crash, then they build back up. T issues become
oxygen deficient and then flooded again. The body becomes more adaptable
and flexible and learns that all these physiological responses can come
under our control. Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to
bend so that we don’ t get broken. •       •       •
Back on the park lawn, there is no more huf fing, no more irritable heart. The journey into self-inflicted sympathetic stress is over . Outside, the world
seems to yawn awake in a Disney-like montage: the crackle of pine needles
beneath the feet of a squirrel, a brush of wind through the branches, the caw
of a distant hawk, all of it broadcast in high fidelity . Getting here took some ef fort, and if I wasn’ t laid out on a mat in a park,
breathing this hard for this long could be dangerous. McGee repeatedly told
me, as he told all his students, to never , ever practice T ummo while driving,
walking, or in “any other environment where you might get hurt if you passout.” And never practice it if you might have a heart condition or are
pregnant. Nobody knows how eliciting such extreme stress might af fect the
immune and nervous systems in the long term. Some pulmonauts, like
Anders Olsson and other slow-and-less proponents, ar gue that this kind of
forced overbreathing could actually be more damaging than it’ s worth
“given the adrenaline society we live in,” Olsson told me. I’m less certain. Alexandra David-Néel used T ummo and other ancient
breathing and meditation practices until she died in 1969, at the age of 100. One of her acolytes, a man named Maurice Daubard, is still alive. Daubard
had spent his teenage years bedridden in a village hospital with
tuberculosis, chronic lung inflammation, and other illnesses. By his 20s, the
doctors had given up. Daubard decided to heal himself. He read books,
trained in yoga, and taught himself T ummo. He not only completely cured
his body of any sickness but gained a superhuman strength. On his of f hours of working as a hairdresser he’d strip to his underwear
and run barefoot through snowy forests. Decades before W im Hof, he
immersed himself in ice from the neck down and sat there motionless for 55
minutes. Later , he ran 150 miles beneath the searing sun of the Sahara
desert. At 71, he toured the Himalayas on his bike at an elevation of 16,500
feet. But his greatest feat, Daubard said, was helping thousands of others with
illnesses learn the power of T ummo to heal themselves, just as he’d done. “The human is not only an or ganism . . . it is also a mind whose strength
used wisely can allow us to repair our body when it wobbles,” wrote
Daubard. As of this writing, Daubard had just turned 89. He still plays harp,
reads without glasses, and leads T ummo retreats in the Italian Alps above
Aosta, where students join him in stripping down to underwear and sitting
in the snow for an hour , then hike half-naked up mountains, and finish with
a dip in an ice-covered alpine lake. “[T ummo] is for the reconstitution of man’ s immune system,” Daubard
proclaimed. “It’ s a fabulous way for the future of man’ s health.”Tummo isn’t the only  heavy breathing technique to have recently had a
resur gence in the W est. Several years ago, when I was early in my research, I’d heard about a
practice called Holotropic Breathwork created by a Czech psychiatrist
named Stanislav Grof. The main focus wasn’ t to reboot the autonomic
nervous system or heal the body; it was to rewire the mind. An estimated
one million people had tried it, and today more than a thousand trained
facilitators run workshops around the world. I paid a visit to Grof, whose home was just a half hour north of me in
Marin County . I drove along a tree-lined street where oak roots the size of
human thighs buckled narrow sidewalks and pulled up to the driveway of a
Mid-century modern house, grabbed my bag, and approached the front
door . Grof greeted me in a blue oxford shirt, khakis, and clogs. He walked me
into his living room past Buddhist figures, Hindu gods, Indonesian masks,
and stacks of the 20 books he has written over the years. T wo sliding glass
doors of fered a view of hills sprinkled with red-tile Spanish-style rooftops. W e sat at a redwood patio table and Grof told me how it all began. —
It was November 1956, and Grof was a student at the Czechoslovak
Academy of Sciences in Prague. The university’ s psychology department
had been sent a sample of a new drug from Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical
company . The drug was originally developed to treat menstrual and
headache pain, but Sandoz found that the side ef fects, which included
hallucinations, were too severe to make it marketable. Sandoz thought
psychiatrists might use it to better understand and communicate with their
schizophrenic patients. Grof volunteered to try it. An assistant strapped him to a chair and
injected him with a hundred micrograms. “I saw light as I had never seen it
before, I could not believe it existed,” Grof later recalled. “My first thought
was that I was looking at Hiroshima. I then saw myself above the clinic,
Prague, the planet. Consciousness had no boundaries, I was beyond the
planet. I had cosmic consciousness.”
Grof was one of the first-ever test subjects of lyser gic acid
diethylamide-25, better known as LSD.The experience would guide Grof ’ s research at the Czechoslovak
Academy of Sciences and, later , at Johns Hopkins University , where he
would research psychotherapy treatments with patients. By 1968, the U.S.
government had outlawed the use of LSD, so Grof and his wife, Christina,
sought a therapy with the same hallucinatory and healing ef fects that
wouldn’ t get them thrown in jail. They discovered heavy breathing. The Grofs’ technique was essentially T ummo cranked up to 11. It
involved lying on a floor in a dark room, with loud music playing, breathing
as hard and quickly as you could for up to three hours. W illingly breathing
to the point of exhaustion, they found, could place patients in a state of
stress where they could access subconscious and unconscious thoughts. Essentially , the therapy helped people blow a fuse in their minds so they
could return to a state of groovy calm. The Grofs called it Holotropic Breathwork, from the Greek holos , which
means “whole,” and tr epein , which translates to “progressing toward
something.” Holotropic Breathwork broke the mind down and moved it
toward wholeness. It took some doing. Holotropic Breathwork often included a journey
through “the dark night of the soul,” where patients would experience a
“painful confrontation” with themselves. Sometimes patients might vomit
or suf fer nervous breakdowns. If they got through all that, mystical visions,
spiritual awakenings, psychological breakthroughs, out-of-body
experiences, and, sometimes, what Grof called a “mini life-death-rebirth”
could follow . It was so powerful that patients reported seeing their whole
lives flash before their eyes. It quickly gained popularity with psychiatrists. “W e took psychotic people, people nobody else wanted to deal with,
people for whom any medicines weren’ t working,” said Dr . James
Eyerman, a psychiatrist who has used the therapy in his practice for the past
30 years. From 1989 to 2001, Eyerman led more than 11,000 patients at Saint
Anthony’ s Medical Center in St. Louis through Holotropic Breathwork. He
documented the experiences of 482 manic-depressives, schizophrenics, and
others, and found that the therapy had significant and lasting benefits. A 14-
year -old patient who’d tried to slit his own throat breathed a few Holotropic
breaths and sailed of f into an altered state of “pure consciousness.” A 31-
year -old woman addicted to several drugs had an out-of-body experience
and, afterward, sobered up and went on to lead a 12-step program. Eyermansaw thousands of similar transformations and reported no adverse reactions
or side ef fects. “These patients would get pretty wild, but it worked for
them,” he told me. “It worked incredibly well. And the hospital staf f just
couldn’ t figure out why .”
A few smaller studies followed and showed positive outcomes for
people with anxieties, low self-esteem, asthma, and “interpersonal
problems.” But for most of its 50-year history , Holotropic Breathwork has
been sparsely studied, and the studies that do exist gauge subjective
experience—that is, how people say they felt before and after . I wanted to feel it for myself, so I signed up for a session. •       •       •
On a crisp fall day I drove a few hours north of Grof ’ s home to a hot
springs resort tucked beneath the shade of ancient redwoods. There were
dusty yurts, heavily bearded men in toe shoes, women in braids wearing
turquoise, homemade granola in Mason jars. It was exactly the kind of
scene I’d expected. What I didn’ t expect were the corporate lawyers,
architects in pressed polo shirts, and muscle men in military-style flattops
who had also gathered here. A dozen of us walked into an activity room of a dormitory . Half the
group lay down on the floor and prepared to breathe while the other half,
the sitters, watched over them. I volunteered to be a sitter for a man named
Kerry , who wore Armani glasses and asked me not to touch him during the
session because he feared any contact might burn his skin. The music started, a predictable mix of thumping techno with
reverberating lutes and Arabic maqam yodels. What happened next was
predictable, too. The business folks breathed heavily and wiggled around on
their mats but mostly kept calm and to themselves. Meanwhile, the natural
healers in the group went apeshit. After just a few minutes of breathing, a big man named Ben, who lived
of f the grid in a cabin a few miles up the mountain, sat up and stared in awe
at the palms of his hands as if he were holding a magic Hobbit stone. A few
more breaths and Ben began snorting and scratching his crotch. He growled
and howled like a wolf, then took of f around the room on all fours. The
therapists running the session snuck up behind Ben and wrestled him to the
floor . They sat on him until he transmogrified back into a human.Behind Ben, a woman named Mary jabbed her eyes with her knuckles
and screamed for her mother . “I want my mommy . I hate you, Mommy . I
want my mommy . I hate you, Mommy ,” she sobbed in an alternating devil-
and-baby voice. She wormed to a corner and curled up like an abused dog. This went on for two hours. I couldn’ t help but notice that neither Mary nor Ben were breathing any
faster or deeper than anyone else; they weren’ t breathing any faster than
me, and I was just sitting there calmly watching this scene unravel. —
By afternoon, the group switched positions and it was my turn to walk
through the dark night of the soul. I’ll admit, I was pretty dubious at this
point, but I gave it my all, breathing as hard as I could for as long as I
could. I felt really hot and sweated, then felt very cold and sweated. My
legs went numb, and my fingers uncontrollably coiled into claws, a
common muscle-contraction side ef fect of hyperventilation called tetany . My mind wandered, and I was convinced I’d entered into some waking
dream state, where the sounds, music, and sensations of my surroundings
mingled freely with subconscious thoughts and images. Sometime later , the hollow electric drums, fake cymbal crashes, and
keyboard lutes faded back into my consciousness, and it was over . The
group was invited to sit around a table and draw mandalas with crayons on
what they’d just experienced. I walked outside into the perfumed evening
air and drank a warm beer alone in the passenger seat of my car . On one hand, Holotropic Breathwork was transformative for Ben and
Mary , and hundreds of thousands of others who’d experienced it. On the
other , there was obviously some psychosomatic influence going on there. I
couldn’ t help wondering how much of its curative ef fects were the result of
the environment, of the “set and setting,” and how much might be a
measurable, physical response to breathing so heavily for so long. Grof believed that at least some visual and introspective experiences
were triggered by having less oxygen in the brain. —
During rest, about 750 milliliters of blood—enough to fill a full wine bottle
—flows through the brain every minute. Blood flow can increase a littleduring exercise just as it does in other parts of the body , but it will usually
stay consistent. That changes when we breathe heavily . Whenever the body is forced to
take in more air than it needs, we’ll exhale too much carbon dioxide, which
will narrow the blood vessels and decrease circulation, especially in the
brain. W ith just a few minutes, or even seconds, of overbreathing, brain
blood flow can decrease by 40 percent, an incredible amount. The areas most af fected by this are the brain’ s hippocampus and frontal,
occipital, and parieto-occipital cortices, which, together , govern functions
such as visual processing, body sensory information, memory , the
experience of time, and the sense of self. Disturbances in these areas can
elicit powerful hallucinations, which include out-of-body experiences and
waking dreams. If we keep breathing a little faster and deeper , more blood
will drain from the brain, and the visual and auditory hallucinations will
become more profound. In addition, the sustained pH imbalance in the blood sends distress
signals throughout the body , specifically to the limbic system, which
controls emotions, arousal, and other instincts. Consciously sustaining these
stress signals long enough may trick the more primitive limbic system into
thinking the body is dying. This could explain why so many people
experience sensations of death and rebirth during Holotropic Breathwork. They have consciously driven their bodies into a state that it perceives as
potentially lethal, and then lulled it back out by conscious breathing. Grof admitted that researchers were a long way from really
understanding the full picture. He was OK with that; he just knew
Holotropic Breathwork of fered a heavy shove that so many patients needed
but weren’ t getting with other therapies. Heavy breathing alone did for them
what nothing else could do.Nine
HOLD IT
In 1968, Dr . Arthur Kling left his of fice at the University of Illinois Medical
College and caught a flight to Cayo Santiago, a wild and unpopulated island
on Puerto Rico’ s southeast coast. He grabbed some traps, captured a group
of wild monkeys, then took the animals back to the lab to conduct a bizarre
and cruel experiment. Kling began by opening the monkey’ s skulls and
removed a dollop of brain from each side. He let the monkeys recover , then
released them back into the jungle. Beyond a few scars on their heads, the monkeys looked normal, but
something was wrong inside their brains. They had trouble navigating the
world. Some starved to death. Others drowned. A few were quickly
devoured by other animals. W ithin two weeks, all of Kling’ s monkeys were
dead. A couple years later , Kling traveled to Zambia, just upstream from
V ictoria Falls, and repeated the experiment. W ithin seven hours of releasing
the altered monkeys back into the wild, all had disappeared. The monkeys all died because they couldn’ t recognize which animals
were prey and which were predators. They didn’ t sense the danger of
wading into a rushing river , swinging from a thin branch, or approaching a
rival troop. The animals had no sense of fear , because Kling had removed
fear from their brains. Specifically , Kling had clipped out the monkeys’ amygdalae, two
almond-size nodes at the center of the temporal lobes. The amygdalae help
monkeys, humans, and other high-order vertebrates remember , make
decisions, and process emotions. These nodes are also believed to be the
alarm circuit of fear , signaling threats and initiating a reaction to fight orrun away . W ithout the amygdalae, Kling wrote, all the monkeys “appeared
retarded in their ability to foresee and avoid dangerous confrontations.”
W ithout fear , survival was impossible, or , at minimum, extremely
precarious. —
Back in the United States, a girl whom psychologists would name S. M.
was born around this time with a rare genetic condition called Urbach-
W iethe disease. The condition caused cell mutations and a buildup of fatty
material throughout her body , giving her skin a lumpy and puf fy appearance
and making her voice hoarse. When S. M. was ten, the deposits had spread
into her brain. For reasons nobody understands, the disease left most
regions unharmed, but destroyed her amygdalae. S. M. could see, feel, hear , think, and taste just like anyone else. She had
a normal IQ, memory , and perception. But as S. M. entered her late teenage
years, her sense of fear diminished. She would approach total strangers,
stand a few inches from their faces, and describe her most intimate sexual
secrets, never afraid of embarrassment or rejection. She’d walk outside in a
violent thunderstorm to chat with a neighbor , never worrying she’d be
battered by debris. She’d eat food if it was around, but wouldn’ t bother
stocking up if the cupboards were bare. S. M. had no fear of growing
hungry . She even lost the ability to recognize fear in the faces of those around
her . S. M. could easily register happiness, confusion, or the sadness of
friends and family , but didn’ t have a clue when someone was scared or
threatened. W orries, stress, and anxiety all dissolved along with her
amygdalae. One day , when S. M. was in her 40s, a man in a pickup truck pulled up
and asked her to go on a date. She got in, and the man drove her to an
abandoned barn, threw her on the ground, and tore of f her clothes. Suddenly , a dog ran into the barn, and the man became nervous that people
might be close behind. He zipped up his pants and dusted himself of f. S. M.
casually got up and followed the man back to his car . She asked to be
driven home. —Dr . Justin Feinstein met S. M. in 2006 while getting a PhD in clinical
neuropsychology at the University of Iowa. Feinstein specialized in
anxieties, specifically in how to get over them. He knew that fear was the
core of all anxieties: a fear of gaining weight led to anorexia; fear of crowds
led to agoraphobia; fear of losing control led to panic attacks. Anxieties
were an oversensitivity to perceived fear , be it spiders, the opposite sex,
confined spaces, whatever . On a neuronal level, anxieties and phobias were
caused by overreactive amygdalae. Researchers had spent two decades studying S. M., trying to understand
her condition, and trying to scare her . They showed S. M. films of humans
eating excrement, took her to theme-park haunted houses, and put slithering
snakes on her arms. Nothing worked. Determined, Feinstein dug deeper and found a study in which human
subjects were administered a single breath of carbon dioxide. Even with a
small amount, patients reported feelings of suf focation, as if they’d been
forced to hold their breath for several minutes. Their oxygen levels hadn’ t
changed and the subjects knew they were never in danger , but many still
suf fered debilitating panic attacks that lasted for minutes. This wasn’ t a
reaction to a perceived fear or an external threat; it wasn’ t psychological. The gas was physically triggering some other mechanism in their brains and
bodies. Feinstein and a group of neurosur geons, psychologists, and research
assistants set up an experiment at a laboratory at the University of Iowa
hospital. They brought S. M. in and sat her down at a desk, fitting an inhaler
mask over her face, connected to an inhaler bag that contained a few
lungfuls of 35 percent carbon dioxide and the rest room air . They explained
to S. M. that the carbon dioxide would not damage her body , her tissues and
brain would have plenty of oxygen. She would never be in any danger . Hearing this, S. M. looked the way she always looked: bored. “W e weren’ t expecting anything to happen,” Feinstein told me. “Nobody was.” A few moments later , Feinstein released the carbon dioxide
mix into the mouthpiece. S. M. inhaled. Right away , her droopy eyes grew wider . Her shoulder muscles tensed,
her breathing became labored. She grabbed at the desk. “Help me!” she
yelled through the mouthpiece. S. M. lifted an arm and waved it as if she
were drowning. “I can’ t!” she screamed. “I can’ t breathe!” A researcher
yanked the mask of f, but it didn’ t help. S. M. jerked wildly and gasped. Aminute or so later , she dropped her arms and returned to breathing slowly
and calmly . A single puf f of carbon dioxide did to S. M. what no snakes, horror
movies, or thunderstorms could. For the first time in 30 years, she’d felt
fear , a full-fledged panic attack. Her amygdalae hadn’ t grown back. Her
brain was the same as it had always been. But some dormant switch had
suddenly been flipped. S. M. refused to inhale carbon dioxide again. Y ears later , the mere idea
of it stressed her out. So Feinstein and his researchers confirmed the results
with two German twins who also suf fered from Urbach-W iethe disease. The
twins had lost their amygdalae, and neither had felt fear in a decade. A
single inhalation of carbon dioxide quickly changed that when both suf fered
the same debilitating anxiety , panic, and crushing fear as S. M.
The textbooks were wrong. The amygdalae were not the only “alarm
circuit of fear .” There was another , deeper circuit in our bodies that was
generating perhaps a more powerful sense of danger than anything the
amygdalae alone could muster . It was shared not only by S. M., the German
twins, and the few dozen others with Urbach-W iethe disease, but by
everyone and almost every living thing—all people, animals, even insects
and bacteria. It was the deep fear and crushing anxiety that comes from the feeling of
not being able to take another breath. •       •       •
T ake a sip of air through the nose or mouth. For this exercise, it doesn’ t
matter . Now hold it. In a few moments, you’ll feel a slight hunger for more. As this hunger mounts, the mind will race, the lungs will ache. Y ou’ll
become nervous, paranoid, and irritable. Y ou’ll start to panic. All senses
will zero in on that miserable, suf focating feeling, and your sole desire will
be to take another 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 toincrease 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. Chemoreception is one of the most fundamental functions of life. When
the first aerobic life forms evolved two and a half billion years ago, they
had to sense carbon dioxide to avoid it. The chemoreception that developed
passed up through bacteria to more complex life. It’ s what stimulates the
suf focating feeling you just felt holding your breath. As humans evolved, our chemoreception became more plastic, meaning
it could flex and shift with changing environments. It’ s this ability to adapt
to dif ferent levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen that helped humans
colonize altitudes 800 feet below and 16,000 feet above sea level. T oday , 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. S. M. and the German twins didn’ t suf fer
from a debilitating panic attack and anxiety because of mental illness. They
suf fered because of a broken line of communication between their
chemoreceptors and the rest of their brains. This may sound very basic: of course we’re conditioned to panic when
we’re denied a breath or think we’re about to be. But the scientific reason
for that panic—that it can be generated by chemoreceptors and br eathing
instead of by external psychological threats processed by the amygdalae—is
profound. All this suggests that for the past hundred years psychologists may have
been treating chronic fears, and all the anxieties that come with them, in the
wrong way . Fears weren’ t just a mental problem, and they couldn’ t be
treated by simply getting patients to think dif ferently . Fears and anxiety had
a physical manifestation, too. They could be generated from outside the
amygdalae, from within a more ancient part of the reptilian brain. Eighteen percent of Americans suf fer from some form of anxiety or
panic, with these numbers rising every year . Perhaps the best step in
treating them, and hundreds of millions of others around the world, was byfirst conditioning the central chemoreceptors and the rest of the brain to
become more flexible to carbon dioxide levels. 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. The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu spiritual text written
around 2,000 years ago, translated the breathing practice of pranayama to
mean “trance induced by stopping all breathing.” A few centuries after that,
Chinese scholars wrote several volumes detailing the art of breathholding. One text, A Book on Br eath by the Master Gr eat Nothing of Sung-Shan ,
of fered this advice:
Lie down every day , pacify your mind, cut of f thoughts and
block the breath. Close your fists, inhale through your nose, and
exhale through your mouth. Do not let the breathing be audible. Let it be most subtle and fine. When the breath is full, block it. The blocking (of the breath) will make the soles of your feet
perspire. Count one hundred times “one and two.” After
blocking the breath to the extreme, exhale it subtly . Inhale a little
more and block (the breath) again. If (you feel) hot, exhale with
“Ho.” If (you feel) cold, blow the breath out and exhale it with
(the sound) “Ch’ui.” If you can breathe (like this) and count to
one thousand (when blocking), then you will need neither grains
nor medicine. T oday , breathholding is associated almost entirely with disease. “Don’ t
hold your breath,” the adage goes. Denying our bodies a consistent flow of
oxygen, we’ve been told, is bad. For the most part, this is sound advice. Sleep apnea, a form of chronic unconscious breathholding, is terribly
damaging, as most of us know by now , causing or contributing to
hypertension, neurological disorders, autoimmune diseases, and more. Breathholding during waking hours is injurious as well, and more
widespread.Up to 80 percent of of fice workers (according to one estimate) suf fer
from something called continuous partial attention. W e’ll scan our email,
write something down, check T witter , and do it all over again, never really
focusing on any specific task. In this state of perpetual distraction, breathing
becomes shallow and erratic. Sometimes we won’ t breathe at all for a half
minute or longer . The problem is serious enough that the National Institutes
of Health has enlisted several researchers, including Dr . David Anderson
and Dr . Mar garet Chesney , to study its ef fects over the past decades. Chesney told me that the habit, also known as “email apnea,” can contribute
to the same maladies as sleep apnea. How could modern science and ancient practices be so at odds? Again, it comes down to will. The breathholding that occurs in sleep and
constant partial attention is unconscious —it’ s something that happens to our
bodies, something that’ s out of our control. The breathholding practiced by
the ancients and revivalists is conscious . These are practices we will
ourselves to do. And when we do them properly , I’d heard they can work wonders. •       •       •
It’ s a muggy W ednesday morning and I’m sitting on a rumpled sofa in
Justin Feinstein’ s of fice at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in
downtown T ulsa, Oklahoma. Across from me is a window that looks out
over a cardboard-colored sky and a paisley landscape of red and orange
leaves. Feinstein is seated below it, flipping through a stack of scientific
papers on a doublewide desk that has not one inch of vacant space. He’ s
wearing an untucked button-down shirt with the cuf fs rolled up, flip-flops,
and baggy khakis with crayon stains, compliments of his three-year -old
daughter . He looks the way you’d imagine a neuropsychologist to look:
brainy with a touch of funk. Feinstein has just been awarded a five-year NIH grant to test the use of
inhaled carbon dioxide on patients with panic and anxiety disorders. After
his experience administering the gas to S. M. and the German twins with
Urbach-W iethe disease, he’d become convinced carbon dioxide could not
only cause panic and anxiety , but that it might also help cure it. He believed
that breathing heavy doses of carbon dioxide might elicit the same physicaland psychological benefits as the thousand-year -old breathholding
techniques. But his therapy didn’ t require patients to actually hold their breath or
block their throats and count to one hundred with clenched hands like the
ancient Chinese. His patients were far too anxious and impatient to practice
such an intense technique. Carbon dioxide did all that for them. They’d
come in, think about whatever they wanted to think about, take a few
inhales of the gas, flex their chemoreceptors back to normal, and be on their
way . It was the ancient art of breathholding for those people too anxious to
hold their breath.
_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:

        But he too was universally ignored, and
often ridiculed. After one lecture at his alma mater, several colleagues
claimed he had faked his data and Photoshopped his X-rays. “Y ou cannot
grow bone past 30,” they reprimanded him, time and again. Belfor and Corruccini are still waiting for their Mew moment, when the
establishment starts to come around. In the meantime, I’ve come around. Exactly a year to the week after I began wearing Belfor ’ s retainer, I
visited a private radiology clinic in downtown San Francisco and had my
airways, sinuses, and mouth rescanned. Belfor sent the results to
AnalyzeDirect at the Mayo Clinic to study what had happened to my face
and airways. The results were stunning. I had gained 1,658 cubic millimeters of new
bone in my cheeks and right eye socket, the equivalent volume of five
pennies. I’d also added 118 cubic millimeters of bone along my nose, and
178 along my upper jaw. My jaw position became better aligned and
balanced. My airways widened and became firmer. The deposit of pus and
granulation that had accumulated in my maxillary sinuses, likely the result
of mild chronic obstruction, was completely gone. Sure, it took weeks to get used to having a chunk of plastic in my mouth
at night. Spit built up, my throat constricted, and my teeth ached. But like
most discomforts in life, it got easier and less annoying the longer I did it. As I write this, because of chewing and some widening of my palate, I
am breathing more easily and freely than I ever remember. Other than that
week and a half in which I purposely obstructed my nose in the Stanford
experiment, I have suf fered only one stuf fy nose this year, when I came
down with a cold. Even with my messed-up, middle-aged mouth and face,
I’d managed to make real progress. *
“Nature seeks homeostasis and balance,” Belfor told me on the phone in
one of our dozens of conversations since we first met. “Y ou were out of
balance. Just look at the scans. Nature corrected you by adding a
tremendous amount of bone to your face—the proof is in the pudding. ”
This is what I learned at the end of this long and very strange trip
through the causes and cures of airway obstruction. That our noses and
mouths are not predetermined at birth, childhood, or even in adulthood. W e
can reverse the clock on much of the damage that’ s been done in the past
few hundred years by force of will, with nothing more than proper posture,
hard chewing, and perhaps some mewing. And with the obstruction out of the way, we can finally get back to
breathing. Part Three
BREATHING+Eight
MORE, ON OCCASION
The morning after our celebratory “last” supper, Olsson and I hop back in
my car and drive down to Stanford for our final inspection with Dr. Nayak. W e are rescanned, reprodded, repoked, and repeppered with questions. The
same tests we ran through ten days ago, and ten days before that. The data
for both stages of the experiment, we’re told, will be available later this
month. W e are free to breathe, free to go. For Olsson, that means heading back to Sweden. For me, it means
further exploration to the outer limits of breath. •       •       •
The techniques I’ll pursue from this point forward will not hold to the slow-
and-steady style. They are not  accessible to everyone, everywhere. Y ou
can’ t practice them while flipping through the pages of this book. Several
take a long time to master, require concerted ef fort, and can be
uncomfortable. Pulmonary medicine has many scary names for what these more
extreme techniques can do to the body and mind: respiratory acidosis,
alkalosis, hypocapnia, sympathetic nervous system overload, extreme
apnea. Under normal circumstances, these conditions are considered
damaging and would require medical care. But something else happens when we practice these techniques
willingly, when we consciously push our bodies into these states for a few
minutes, or hours, a day. In some cases, they can radically transform lives. Collectively, I’m calling these potent techniques Breathing+, because
they build on the foundation of practices I described earlier in this book,
and because many require extra focus and of fer extra rewards. Some
involve breathing really fast for a very long time; others require breathing
very slow for even longer. A few entail not breathing at all for a few
minutes. These methods, too, date back thousands of years, vanished, then
were rediscovered again at a dif ferent time in a dif ferent culture, renamed
and redeployed. At best, Breathing+ can of fer a deeper view into the secrets of our most
basic biological function. At worst, breathing this way can provoke heavy
sweats, nausea, and exhaustion. This, I would learn, is all part of the
process. It’ s the respiratory gauntlet required to get to the other side. •       •       •
As unlikely as it sounds, the first Breathing+ technique I’ll explore emer ged
in the W estern world on Civil W ar battlefields. It was 1862 and Jacob Mendez Da Costa had just arrived at T urner ’ s
Lane Hospital in Philadelphia. The Union Army had suf fered a humiliating
defeat at Fredericksbur g, V ir ginia, where twelve hundred men had been
killed and more than 9,000 wounded. Soldiers were laid out in the hallways,
bruised and bleeding on rows of cots, missing ears, fingers, arms, and legs. Even those who hadn’ t seen military action were falling apart. They
came into the hospital in droves, complaining of anxiety and paranoia,
headaches, diarrhea, dizziness, and shooting pain in their chests. They
sighed a lot. When the men tried to breathe, they’d huf f and huf f, but would
never feel like they could catch a breath. These men showed no signs of
physical damage; they had spent weeks or months preparing for battle but
never saw any action. Nothing had happened  to them. And yet each was
incapacitated, hobbling beneath the whitewashed walls of the hospital, past
the rows of screaming and suf fering amputees, trying to find their way into
Da Costa’ s care. Da Costa was a glum-looking man with a bald head, lambchop
sideburns, and tired, Portuguese eyes. He’d been born on the island of St. Thomas and spent years studying medicine in Europe with leading
sur geons. He’d become a renowned expert in the maladies of the heart andhad treated scores of men with myriad ailments. But he’d never seen
anything like the soldiers at T urner ’ s Lane. He started the examinations by lifting the men’ s shirts and placing a
stethoscope to their chests. The soldiers’ heartbeats were manic, thumping
up to 200 beats per minute, even though they were sitting still. Some
breathed 30 or more times a minute, double the normal pace. One typical patient was W illiam C. , a 21-year -old farmer who, after
deployment, developed vicious diarrhea and a bluish tint to his hands. He
complained of breathlessness. Henry H. had identical symptoms and shared
W illiam C. ’ s skinny build, with a narrow chest and a stooped spine. He too
had enlisted in good health, then, without explanation, was immobilized. “The man did not look sick,” wrote Da Costa. But his heart rate was “of
irregular rhythm, some beats following each other in rapid succession. ”
Hundreds of men would come to see Da Costa over the next few years,
with the same cluster of complaints, the same backstory. Da Costa would
call the malady Irritable Heart Syndrome. The syndrome was puzzling in another way: the symptoms came on, and
then they would disappear. A few days, weeks, or months of rest and
relaxation, and heartbeats would soften, digestive problems would abate. The men became normal again and they’d breathe normally again, too. Most would be sent back to war. The few still suf fering would be placed in
the “invalid corps” or shipped home to deal with the syndrome for the rest
of their lives. Da Costa recorded reams of data on these men, and he released a formal
clinical study in 1871, which would become a landmark in the history of
cardiovascular disease. But Irritable Heart Syndrome wasn’ t confined to just the Civil W ar. The
same symptoms would show up half a century later in 20 percent of soldiers
who fought in W orld W ar I, a million soldiers in W orld W ar II, and
hundreds of thousands more in V ietnam and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Doctors dreamed up new names for these problems along the way,
believing they had discovered a new kind of illness. They told soldiers they
suf fered from shell shock, soldier ’ s heart, post-V ietnam syndrome, and
post-traumatic stress disorder. They considered the ailments to be
psychological, some disturbance in the brain brought on by fighting. Soldiers often blamed exposure to chemicals or vaccines, although nobody
really knew for sure. Da Costa had his own theories. At T urner ’ s Hospital, he suspected he
was dealing with, in his words, “a disorder of the sympathetic nervous
system. ”
It is the same disorder I’m feeling right now. •       •       •
It’ s late morning and I’m splayed out on a yoga mat on the parched lawn of
a roadside public park in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. There’ s a picnic table full of emer gency medical technicians eating lunch to
my right, an old man brown-bagging a tallboy beer on a bench to my left. Above me, the autumn sun is so clear and bright that it’ s blinding, even
through squinted eyes. I take a huge, heaving breath into the pit of my
abdomen and let it out. I’ve been doing this for the past few minutes, and I
can feel beads of sweat erupting on my forehead and face. I’ve got another
half hour to go. “T wenty more. ” yells the man standing over me. I can barely hear him
through the thunder of big rigs shifting gears on the highway behind us. His
name is Chuck McGee III, and he’ s a big dude with a sandy bowl cut,
rainbow-lensed blade glasses, and car go shorts that dangle just a few inches
above white socks and dirt-baked sneakers. I’ve hired him for the day to
help me redline my sympathetic nervous system with overbreathing. So far it’ s working. My heart is beating violently. It feels like there’ s a
rodent loose in my chest. I feel anxious and paranoid, sweaty and
claustrophobic. This must be the sympathetic overload. This must be Irritable Heart
Syndrome coming on. —
Breathing, as it happens, is more than just a biochemical or physical act; it’ s
more than just moving the diaphragm downward and sucking in air to feed
hungry cells and remove wastes. The tens of billions of molecules we bring
into our bodies with every breath also serve a more subtle, but equally
important role. They influence nearly every internal or gan, telling them
when to turn on and of f. They af fect heart rate, digestion, moods, attitudes;
when we feel aroused, and when we feel nauseated. Breathing is a power
switch to a vast network called the autonomic nervous system. There are two sections of this system, and they serve opposite functions. Each is essential to our well-being. The first, called the parasympathetic nervous system, stimulates
relaxation and restoration. The mellow buzz you get during a long massage
or the sleepiness you feel after a big meal happens because the
parasympathetic nervous system sends signals to your stomach to digest
and to the brain to pump feel-good hormones such as serotonin and
oxytocin into your bloodstream. Parasympathetic stimulation opens the
floodgates in our eyes and makes tears flow at weddings. It prompts
salivation before meals, loosens the bowels to eliminate waste, and
stimulates the genitals before sex. For these reasons, it’ s sometimes called
the “feed and breed” system. The lungs are covered with nerves that extend to both sides of the
autonomic nervous system, and many of the nerves connecting to the
parasympathetic system are located in the lower lobes, which is one reason
long and slow breaths are so relaxing. As molecules of breath descend
deeper, they switch on parasympathetic nerves, which send more messages
for the or gans to rest and digest. As air ascends through the lungs during
exhalation, the molecules stimulate an even more powerful parasympathetic
response. The deeper and more softly we breathe in, and the longer we
exhale, the more slowly the heart beats and the calmer we become. People
have evolved to spend the majority of waking hours—and all of our
sleeping hours—in this state of recovery and relaxation. Chilling out helped
make us human. The second half of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic, has
an opposite role. It sends stimulating signals to our or gans, telling them to
get ready for action. A profusion of the nerves to this system are spread out
at the top of the lungs. When we take short, hasty breaths, the molecules of
air switch on the sympathetic nerves. These work like 911 calls. The more
messages the system gets, the bigger the emer gency. That negative ener gy you feel when someone cuts you of f in traf fic or
wrongs you at work is the sympathetic system ramping up. In these states,
the body redirects blood flow from less-vital or gans like the stomach and
bladder and sends it to the muscles and brain. Heart rate increases,
adrenaline kicks in, blood vessels constrict, pupils dilate, palms sweat, the
mind sharpens. Sympathetic states help ease pain and keep blood fromdraining out if we get injured. They make us meaner and leaner, so we can
fight harder or run faster when confronted with danger. But our bodies are built to stay in a state of heightened sympathetic alert
only for short bursts, and only on occasion. Although sympathetic stress
takes just a second to activate, turning it of f and returning to a state of
relaxation and restoration can take an hour or more. It’ s what makes food
dif ficult to digest after an accident, and why men have trouble getting
erections and women often can’ t experience or gasms when they’re angry. *
For all these reasons, it seems odd and counterintuitive to willingly
place yourself in an extended state of extreme sympathetic stress, and to do
this every day. Why make yourself light-headed, anxious, and flaccid. And
yet, for centuries, the ancients developed and practiced breathing techniques
that did just this. •       •       •
The stress-inducing breathing method that brought me to this roadside
public park is called Inner Fire Meditation, and it’ s been practiced by
T ibetan Buddhists and their students for the past thousand years. Its history
begins around the tenth century AD, when a 28-year -old Indian man named
Naropa got bored with domestic life. He divorced his wife, packed a bag,
and walked northeast until he was surrounded by stone towers, pavilions,
temples, and blue lotus trees. This dazzling place was Buddhist University
Nalanda, and thousands of scholars from throughout the East gathered there
to study astronomy, astrology, and holistic medicine. A few sought
enlightenment. Naropa excelled in his courses, mastering the lessons of Sutra and the
secret techniques of T antra, which had been handed down from one master
to another over the millennia. He set out into the Himalayas to put
everything he’d learned into practice, living inside a cave on the banks of
the Bagmati River in what is now Kathmandu, Nepal. The cave was cold. Naropa harnessed the power of his breath to keep himself from freezing to
death. The practice became known as T ummo, the T ibetan word for “inner
fire. ”
T ummo was dangerous. If used incorrectly, it could elicit intense sur ges
of ener gy, which could cause serious mental harm. For that reason, it wasreserved only for advanced monks and stayed in the Himalayas, locked up
in the T ibetan monasteries for the next thousand years. Fast-forward to the early 1900s, when a Belgian-French anarchist and
former opera singer was making her way up to T ibet with soot on her face,
yak fur woven into her hair, and a red belt around her head. Her name was
Alexandra David-Néel, and she was in her mid-40s traveling alone through
India—unheard-of at the time for a W estern woman. David-Néel had spent most of her life exploring dif ferent philosophies
and religions. As a teenager, she’d hung out with mystics, starved herself,
beaten herself, and followed diets used by ascetic saints. She was into
Freemasonry and feminism and free love. But it was Buddhism that really
fascinated her. She taught herself Sanskrit, then set out on a spiritual
pilgrimage through India and T ibet that lasted 14 years. Along the way she
happened into a cave high in the Himalayas, just as Naropa had done. It was
there that a T ibetan holy man passed down the instructions for the
superheating power of T ummo. “[T ummo was] but a way devised by the Thibetan hermits of enabling
themselves to live without endangering their health on the high hills,” wrote
David-Néel. “It has nothing to do with religion, and so it can be used for
ordinary purposes without lack of reverence. ” David-Néel would rely on the
practice over and over again to keep happy, healthy, and heated as she hiked
for 19 hours a day in freezing temperatures without food or water, at
elevations above 18,000 feet. —
“T wo more, make them good,” says McGee. I can’ t see him—my eyes are
still squinted—but I can hear him, heavy-breathing alongside me, cheering
me on. I take another giant inhale, then roll the air up to my chest and
exhale, like a wave. I’ve been doing this for what feels like five minutes. My hands are tingling and my intestines feel like they’re slowly uncoiling. I
let out an uncontrolled moan. “Y es. ” McGee cheers. “Expression is the opposite of depression. Go for
it. ”
I moan a little louder, wiggle my body, and breathe a little harder. For a
moment, I get self-conscious thinking about the EMT s and the ruddy-faced
drunk nearby, who no doubt are watching the spectacle: the middle-agedcity boys hyperventilating on a purple BP A-free yoga mat, both of us
sounding like dedicated perverts. This self-expression is an important part of T ummo, McGee said before
we started. It reminds me that the stress I’m creating is dif ferent from the
stress of, say, running late for an important meeting. It is conscious stress. “This is something you are doing to yourself—not something happening to
you. ” McGee keeps yelling. The stress that Da Costa’ s soldiers experienced was unconscious. The
men had grown up in rural environments, outside the noise and crowds of
the city. The more carnage they saw, the more their unconscious
sympathetic responses kept building with no means of release. Eventually,
their nervous systems were so overloaded that they short-circuited and
collapsed. I don’ t want to short-circuit. I want to condition myself so I can remain
flexible to the constant pressures of modern life. “Keep going,” says McGee. “Get it all out. ”
Professional surfers, mixed martial arts fighters, and Navy SEALs use
T ummo-style breathing to get into the zone before a competition or black
ops mission. It’ s also especially useful for middle-aged people who suf fer
from lower -grade stress, aches and pains, and slowing metabolisms. For
them—for me—T ummo can be a preventative therapy, a way to get a
fraying nervous system back on track and keep it there. Simpler and less intense methods of breathing slow, less, through the
nose with a big exhale, can also dif fuse stress and restore balance. These
techniques can be life-changing, and I’d seen dozens of people changed by
them. But they can also take a while, especially for those with long-
standing chronic conditions. Sometimes the body needs more than a soft nudge to get realigned. Sometimes it needs a violent shove. That’ s what T ummo does. •       •       •
That shove is still perplexing to the few scientists paying close attention to
such phenomena. They ask: How exactly can conscious extreme breathing
hack into the autonomic nervous system. Dr. Stephen Por ges, a scientist and professor of psychiatry at the
University of North Carolina, has studied the nervous system and itsresponse to stress for the past 30 years. His primary focus is the vagus
nerve, a meandering network within the system that connects to all the
major internal or gans. The vagus nerve is the power lever; it’ s what turns
or gans on and of f in response to stress. When perceived stress level is very high, the vagus nerve slows heart
rate, circulation, and or gan functions. This is how our reptilian and
mammalian ancestors evolved the ability to “play dead” hundreds of
millions of years ago, to conserve ener gy and deflect aggression when
under attack by predators. Reptiles still access this ability, as do many
mammals. (Imagine the limp body of a mouse in the jaws of a house cat. ) People “play dead,” too, because we share the same mechanisms in the
primitive part of our brain stem. W e call it fainting. Our tendency to faint is
controlled by the vagal system, specifically how sensitive we are to
perceived danger. Some people are so anxious and oversensitive that their
vagus nerves will cause them to faint at the smallest things, like seeing a
spider, hearing bad news, or looking at blood. Most of us aren’ t that sensitive. It’ s much more common, especially in
the modern world, to never experience full-blown, life-threatening stress,
but to never fully relax either. W e’ll spend our days half-asleep and nights
half-awake, lolling in a gray zone of half-anxiety. When we do, the vagus
nerve stays half-stimulated. During these times, the or gans throughout the body won’ t be “shut
down,” but will instead be half supported in a state of suspended animation:
blood flow will decrease and communication between the or gans and the
brain will become choppy, like a conversation through a staticky phone line. Our bodies can persist like this for a while; they can keep us alive, but they
can’ t keep us healthy. Por ges found that patients who suf fer Da Costa–like maladies such as
tingling in their fingers, chronic diarrhea, rapid heart rate, diabetes, and
erectile dysfunction are often treated for each of these symptoms with a
focus on individual or gans. But there’ s nothing wrong with their stomachs,
hearts, or genitals. What they often suf fer from are communication
problems along the vagal and autonomic network, brought on by chronic
stress. T o some researchers, it’ s no coincidence that eight of the top ten
most common cancers af fect or gans cut of f from normal blood flow during
extended states of stress. Fixing the autonomic nervous system can ef fectively cure or lessen
these symptoms. In the past decade, sur geons have implanted electrical
nodes in patients that work as an artificial vagal nerve to restart blood flow
and communication between or gans. The procedure is called vagus nerve
stimulation, and it’ s highly ef fective for patients suf fering from anxiety,
depression, and autoimmune diseases. But there is another, less invasive way Por ges found to stimulate the
vagus nerve: breathing. Breathing is an autonomic function we can consciously control. While
we can’ t simply decide when to slow or speed up our heart or digestion, or
to move blood from one or gan to another, we can choose how and when to
breathe. W illing ourselves to breathe slowly will open up communication
along the vagal network and relax us into a parasympathetic state. Breathing really fast and heavy on purpose flips the vagal response the
other way, shoving us into a stressed state. It teaches us to consciously
access the autonomic nervous system and control it, to turn on heavy stress
specifically so that we can turn it of f and spend the rest of our days and
nights relaxing and restoring, feeding and breeding. “Y ou are not  the passenger,” McGee keeps yelling at me. “Y ou are the
pilot. ”
—
This was supposed to be biologically impossible. The autonomic nervous
system, per its definition, was supposed to be autonomic, as in automatic, as
in beyond our control. And for the past hundred years or so, this belief has
held. In much of medicine, it still holds today. When Alexandra David-Néel finally returned to Paris and wrote about
T ummo and other Buddhist breathing techniques and meditations in her
1927 book, My Journey to Lhasa, few doctors and medical researchers
believed the stories. Few could accept that breathing alone could keep a
body warm in freezing temperatures. Fewer believed it could control
immune function and heal diseases. Through the twentieth century, interest in T ummo grew, and a flood of
anthropologists, researchers, and seekers traveled to the Himalayas and
came back reporting the same feats that David-Néel had been talking about. They told stories of monks wearing nothing but a single layer of clothes
throughout the winter, heating themselves in frigid stone monasteries byday and melting circles in the snow around their bare bodies by night. Eventually, a Harvard Medical School researcher named Herbert Benson
thought it might be time to put T ummo to the test. Benson flew to the Himalayas in 1981, recruited three monks, hooked
them up to sensors that measured the temperature in their fingers and toes,
and then asked them to practice T ummo breathing. During the practice, the
temperature in the monks’ extremities went up by as much as 17 degrees
Fahrenheit and stayed there. The results were published the next year in the
esteemed scientific journal Natur e. The videos and photographs taken during the Harvard experiments
showed short men with satchels wrapped around flabby waists, their skin
covered in a thick sheen of sweat, eyes half-closed and lost in a thousand-
mile stare. The experiments added credence to what DavidNéel and Naropa
and described, and yet Benson’ s monks seemed even stranger than an
anarchist opera singer or ancient mystic. It all seemed totally inaccessible to
W esterners. That would change by the early 2000s, when a Dutch man named W im
Hof ran a half-marathon through the snow above the Arctic Circle shirtless
and in bare feet. Here was a W esterner who had a beard, thinning lead-
colored hair, and a face pulled from a Bruegel painting. In short, he looked
like every other middle-aged Northern European male. Hof hadn’ t grown
up in a cave in India or suf fered from tuberculosis in a village hospital. He’d worked as a mail carrier and was a father of four. Y ears earlier, Hof ’ s wife had taken her own life after years of
depression. He had sought refuge from his pain by deepening his practice of
yoga, meditation, and breathing practices. He unearthed the ancient
technique of T ummo, honed it, simplified it, repackaged it for mass
consumption, and began promoting its powers in a string of daredevil stunts
that would have been quickly discounted if the media hadn’ t been around to
verify them. Hof submer ged himself in a bath filled with ice for an hour and 52
minutes, and he suf fered no hypothermia or frostbite. Then he ran a full
marathon in the Namib desert in temperatures that reached 104, without
ever sipping a drop of water. Over the span of a decade, Hof broke 26 world records, each more
baf fling than the last. These stunts earned him international fame, and hissmiling, frost-covered face soon appeared on dozens of magazine covers, in
flashy documentary specials, and in a handful of books. “W im violated the rules laid out in medical textbooks so drastically
scientists had to pay attention,” said Andrew Huberman, a professor of
neurobiology at Stanford University. Scientists paid attention. In 2011, researchers at Radboud University Medical Center in the
Netherlands brought Hof into a laboratory and started poking and prodding
him, trying to figure out how he did what he did. At one point, they injected
his arm with an endotoxin, a component of E. coli. Exposure to the bacteria
usually induces vomiting, headaches, fever, and other flu-like symptoms. Hof took the E. coli  into his veins and then breathed a few dozen T ummo
breaths, willing his body to fight it of f. He showed no sign of fever, no
nausea. A few minutes later, he rose from the chair and got a cup of cof fee. Hof insisted he wasn’ t special; neither were David-Néel or the T ibetan
monks. Almost anyone could do what they all did. As Hof put it, we just
had to “Breathe, motherfucker. ”
He proved his point three years later, when Radboud University
researchers brought in two dozen healthy male volunteers and randomly
split them into two groups. Half the men spent the next ten days learning
Hof ’ s version of T ummo while exposing themselves to cold, doing things
like playing soccer shirtless in snow. The control group received no
training. The two groups were brought back into the lab. Each was hooked
up to monitors, then injected with the E. coli  endotoxin. The group trained by Hof were able to control their heart rate,
temperature, and immune response, and stimulate the sympathetic system. This practice of heavy breathing along with regular cold exposure was later
discovered to release the stress hormones adrenaline, cortisol, and
norepinephrine on command. The burst of adrenaline gave heavy breathers
ener gy and released a battery of immune cells programmed to heal wounds,
fight of f pathogens and infection. The huge spike in cortisol helped
downgrade short-term inflammatory immune responses, while a squirt of
norepinephrine redirected blood flow from the skin, stomach, and
reproductive or gans to muscles, the brain, and other areas essential in
stressful situations. T ummo heated the body and opened up the brain’ s pharmacy, flooding
the bloodstream with self-produced opioids, dopamine, and serotonin. All
that, with just a few hundred quick and heavy breaths. •       •       •
“One more,” says McGee. “Then let it all out and hold. ”
I do as instructed, and listen as the rushing wind that was pouring
through my lungs suddenly stops and is replaced by pure silence, the kind
of jarring quietude a skydiver feels the moment a parachute opens. But this
stillness is coming from inside. As I hold my breath longer, I feel a
comforting heat spread across my body and face. I focus on my heart, rock
to its vibrations. Each thump sounds and feels like the kick drum from the
beginning of Black Sabbath’ s “Iron Man. ”
“Make the silence between your heartbeats last an eternity,” McGee says
in a soothing voice. After a minute or so, McGee directs me to take in a huge breath without
exhaling, and to hold it again for 15 seconds, gently moving the air around
my chest. At his order, I exhale and the cycle starts all over again “Three
more rounds,” McGee says, his voice raising to a yell. “Be your own
superpower. ”
As I’m huf fing again, I slide my focus to McGee, my cheerleader. He’d
told me earlier how he’d been suddenly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes six
years ago, at 33. His pancreas shut down and no longer produced insulin. Then he suf fered chronic back pain, making him anxious and severely
depressed. His blood pressure shot up. McGee’ s doctor gave him insulin injections to help stabilize his blood
sugar, enalapril to lower his blood pressure, and V alium to ease the pain. “I
was also taking four or five ibuprofen every day,” he said. But nothing
really helped. He only got sicker. McGee was like 15 percent of the American population—more than 50
million people—who suf fer from an autoimmune disorder. In simple terms,
these diseases are the result of an immune system that goes rogue and starts
attacking healthy tissues. Joints become inflamed, muscles and nerve fibers
waste away, rashes cover the skin. These ailments go by many names:
rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto’ s disease, type 1
diabetes. Pharmaceutical treatments, such as immunosuppressants, work by
easing symptoms and keeping the patient more comfortable, but they do
nothing to address the core malfunction in the body. Autoimmune diseases
have no known cure, and even the causes are debated. An increasing bodyof research has shown that many are tied to dysfunction of the autonomic
nervous system. McGee’ s awareness of alternative treatments began when a friend
mentioned a short feature on someone named “the Ice Man” on V ice TV,
the news and culture network. That night McGee tried W im Hof ’ s heavy
breathing technique. “For the first time in a long time, I slept peacefully,”
he told me. He signed up for Hof ’ s ten-week video course, and within
weeks watched as his insulin levels normalized, pain subsided, and blood
pressure plunged. He quit taking enalapril and reduced his insulin intake by
around 80 percent. He still took ibuprofen, but only a pill or two once a
week. McGee was hooked. He flew to Poland to attend an instructor retreat
with Hof, where he and a dozen other students spent two weeks hiking up
snowy mountains and swimming in freezing lakes. They breathed a lot. It
never felt like a competition, McGee told me, or like some extreme fitness
regimen. “Fight it. No pain, no gain. That’ s all bullshit. That’ s how you get
hurt,” McGee explained. The point was to rebalance the body so that it
could do what it is naturally adapted to do. I’d heard dozens of these stories. Men, mainly in their 20s, who’d
suddenly been diagnosed with arthritis and psoriasis or depression, who,
weeks after practicing heavy breathing, no longer suf fered any symptoms. T wenty thousand others in Hof ’ s community exchange blood work data and
other metrics of their transformations online. The before-and-after results
confirmed their claims. Some of these people were reducing inflammatory
markers (C-reactive protein) 40-fold within just a few weeks. “Doctors say this is more pseudoscience than science, that there’ s no
way any of this can be true,” McGee told me. And yet McGee and
thousands of other heavy breathers kept showing profound improvements. They kept getting of f medications they’d been on for years. They kept
heating and healing themselves. “Y ou cannot copyright breathing, that’ s part of it, and you can’ t fault
someone for the way they’ve learned,” said McGee. “All you can do is give
information. ”
•       •       •Here’ s the information: T o practice W im 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. T ake 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. Y ou 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. V ery 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. This flip-flopping—breathing all-out, then not at all, getting really cold
and then hot again—is the key to T ummo’ s magic. It forces the body into
high stress one minute, a state of extreme relaxation the next. Carbon
dioxide levels in the blood crash, then they build back up. T issues become
oxygen deficient and then flooded again. The body becomes more adaptable
and flexible and learns that all these physiological responses can come
under our control. Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to
bend so that we don’ t get broken. •       •       •
Back on the park lawn, there is no more huf fing, no more irritable heart. The journey into self-inflicted sympathetic stress is over. Outside, the world
seems to yawn awake in a Disney-like montage: the crackle of pine needles
beneath the feet of a squirrel, a brush of wind through the branches, the caw
of a distant hawk, all of it broadcast in high fidelity. Getting here took some ef fort, and if I wasn’ t laid out on a mat in a park,
breathing this hard for this long could be dangerous. McGee repeatedly told
me, as he told all his students, to never, ever practice T ummo while driving,
walking, or in “any other environment where you might get hurt if you passout. ” And never practice it if you might have a heart condition or are
pregnant. Nobody knows how eliciting such extreme stress might af fect the
immune and nervous systems in the long term. Some pulmonauts, like
Anders Olsson and other slow-and-less proponents, ar gue that this kind of
forced overbreathing could actually be more damaging than it’ s worth
“given the adrenaline society we live in,” Olsson told me. I’m less certain. Alexandra David-Néel used T ummo and other ancient
breathing and meditation practices until she died in 1969, at the age of 100. One of her acolytes, a man named Maurice Daubard, is still alive. Daubard
had spent his teenage years bedridden in a village hospital with
tuberculosis, chronic lung inflammation, and other illnesses. By his 20s, the
doctors had given up. Daubard decided to heal himself. He read books,
trained in yoga, and taught himself T ummo. He not only completely cured
his body of any sickness but gained a superhuman strength. On his of f hours of working as a hairdresser he’d strip to his underwear
and run barefoot through snowy forests. Decades before W im Hof, he
immersed himself in ice from the neck down and sat there motionless for 55
minutes. Later, he ran 150 miles beneath the searing sun of the Sahara
desert. At 71, he toured the Himalayas on his bike at an elevation of 16,500
feet. But his greatest feat, Daubard said, was helping thousands of others with
illnesses learn the power of T ummo to heal themselves, just as he’d done. “The human is not only an or ganism. it is also a mind whose strength
used wisely can allow us to repair our body when it wobbles,” wrote
Daubard. As of this writing, Daubard had just turned 89. He still plays harp,
reads without glasses, and leads T ummo retreats in the Italian Alps above
Aosta, where students join him in stripping down to underwear and sitting
in the snow for an hour, then hike half-naked up mountains, and finish with
a dip in an ice-covered alpine lake. “[T ummo] is for the reconstitution of man’ s immune system,” Daubard
proclaimed. “It’ s a fabulous way for the future of man’ s health. ”Tummo isn’t the only  heavy breathing technique to have recently had a
resur gence in the W est. Several years ago, when I was early in my research, I’d heard about a
practice called Holotropic Breathwork created by a Czech psychiatrist
named Stanislav Grof. The main focus wasn’ t to reboot the autonomic
nervous system or heal the body; it was to rewire the mind. An estimated
one million people had tried it, and today more than a thousand trained
facilitators run workshops around the world. I paid a visit to Grof, whose home was just a half hour north of me in
Marin County. I drove along a tree-lined street where oak roots the size of
human thighs buckled narrow sidewalks and pulled up to the driveway of a
Mid-century modern house, grabbed my bag, and approached the front
door. Grof greeted me in a blue oxford shirt, khakis, and clogs. He walked me
into his living room past Buddhist figures, Hindu gods, Indonesian masks,
and stacks of the 20 books he has written over the years. T wo sliding glass
doors of fered a view of hills sprinkled with red-tile Spanish-style rooftops. W e sat at a redwood patio table and Grof told me how it all began. —
It was November 1956, and Grof was a student at the Czechoslovak
Academy of Sciences in Prague. The university’ s psychology department
had been sent a sample of a new drug from Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical
company. The drug was originally developed to treat menstrual and
headache pain, but Sandoz found that the side ef fects, which included
hallucinations, were too severe to make it marketable. Sandoz thought
psychiatrists might use it to better understand and communicate with their
schizophrenic patients. Grof volunteered to try it. An assistant strapped him to a chair and
injected him with a hundred micrograms. “I saw light as I had never seen it
before, I could not believe it existed,” Grof later recalled. “My first thought
was that I was looking at Hiroshima. I then saw myself above the clinic,
Prague, the planet. Consciousness had no boundaries, I was beyond the
planet. I had cosmic consciousness. ”
Grof was one of the first-ever test subjects of lyser gic acid
diethylamide-25, better known as LSD. The experience would guide Grof ’ s research at the Czechoslovak
Academy of Sciences and, later, at Johns Hopkins University, where he
would research psychotherapy treatments with patients. By 1968, the U. S. government had outlawed the use of LSD, so Grof and his wife, Christina,
sought a therapy with the same hallucinatory and healing ef fects that
wouldn’ t get them thrown in jail. They discovered heavy breathing. The Grofs’ technique was essentially T ummo cranked up to 11. It
involved lying on a floor in a dark room, with loud music playing, breathing
as hard and quickly as you could for up to three hours. W illingly breathing
to the point of exhaustion, they found, could place patients in a state of
stress where they could access subconscious and unconscious thoughts. Essentially, the therapy helped people blow a fuse in their minds so they
could return to a state of groovy calm. The Grofs called it Holotropic Breathwork, from the Greek holos, which
means “whole,” and tr epein, which translates to “progressing toward
something. ” Holotropic Breathwork broke the mind down and moved it
toward wholeness. It took some doing. Holotropic Breathwork often included a journey
through “the dark night of the soul,” where patients would experience a
“painful confrontation” with themselves. Sometimes patients might vomit
or suf fer nervous breakdowns. If they got through all that, mystical visions,
spiritual awakenings, psychological breakthroughs, out-of-body
experiences, and, sometimes, what Grof called a “mini life-death-rebirth”
could follow. It was so powerful that patients reported seeing their whole
lives flash before their eyes. It quickly gained popularity with psychiatrists. “W e took psychotic people, people nobody else wanted to deal with,
people for whom any medicines weren’ t working,” said Dr. James
Eyerman, a psychiatrist who has used the therapy in his practice for the past
30 years. From 1989 to 2001, Eyerman led more than 11,000 patients at Saint
Anthony’ s Medical Center in St. Louis through Holotropic Breathwork. He
documented the experiences of 482 manic-depressives, schizophrenics, and
others, and found that the therapy had significant and lasting benefits. A 14-
year -old patient who’d tried to slit his own throat breathed a few Holotropic
breaths and sailed of f into an altered state of “pure consciousness. ” A 31-
year -old woman addicted to several drugs had an out-of-body experience
and, afterward, sobered up and went on to lead a 12-step program. Eyermansaw thousands of similar transformations and reported no adverse reactions
or side ef fects. “These patients would get pretty wild, but it worked for
them,” he told me. “It worked incredibly well. And the hospital staf f just
couldn’ t figure out why. ”
A few smaller studies followed and showed positive outcomes for
people with anxieties, low self-esteem, asthma, and “interpersonal
problems. ” But for most of its 50-year history, Holotropic Breathwork has
been sparsely studied, and the studies that do exist gauge subjective
experience—that is, how people say they felt before and after. I wanted to feel it for myself, so I signed up for a session. •       •       •
On a crisp fall day I drove a few hours north of Grof ’ s home to a hot
springs resort tucked beneath the shade of ancient redwoods. There were
dusty yurts, heavily bearded men in toe shoes, women in braids wearing
turquoise, homemade granola in Mason jars. It was exactly the kind of
scene I’d expected. What I didn’ t expect were the corporate lawyers,
architects in pressed polo shirts, and muscle men in military-style flattops
who had also gathered here. A dozen of us walked into an activity room of a dormitory. Half the
group lay down on the floor and prepared to breathe while the other half,
the sitters, watched over them. I volunteered to be a sitter for a man named
Kerry, who wore Armani glasses and asked me not to touch him during the
session because he feared any contact might burn his skin. The music started, a predictable mix of thumping techno with
reverberating lutes and Arabic maqam yodels. What happened next was
predictable, too. The business folks breathed heavily and wiggled around on
their mats but mostly kept calm and to themselves. Meanwhile, the natural
healers in the group went apeshit. After just a few minutes of breathing, a big man named Ben, who lived
of f the grid in a cabin a few miles up the mountain, sat up and stared in awe
at the palms of his hands as if he were holding a magic Hobbit stone. A few
more breaths and Ben began snorting and scratching his crotch. He growled
and howled like a wolf, then took of f around the room on all fours. The
therapists running the session snuck up behind Ben and wrestled him to the
floor. They sat on him until he transmogrified back into a human. Behind Ben, a woman named Mary jabbed her eyes with her knuckles
and screamed for her mother. “I want my mommy. I hate you, Mommy. I
want my mommy. I hate you, Mommy,” she sobbed in an alternating devil-
and-baby voice. She wormed to a corner and curled up like an abused dog. This went on for two hours. I couldn’ t help but notice that neither Mary nor Ben were breathing any
faster or deeper than anyone else; they weren’ t breathing any faster than
me, and I was just sitting there calmly watching this scene unravel. —
By afternoon, the group switched positions and it was my turn to walk
through the dark night of the soul. I’ll admit, I was pretty dubious at this
point, but I gave it my all, breathing as hard as I could for as long as I
could. I felt really hot and sweated, then felt very cold and sweated. My
legs went numb, and my fingers uncontrollably coiled into claws, a
common muscle-contraction side ef fect of hyperventilation called tetany. My mind wandered, and I was convinced I’d entered into some waking
dream state, where the sounds, music, and sensations of my surroundings
mingled freely with subconscious thoughts and images. Sometime later, the hollow electric drums, fake cymbal crashes, and
keyboard lutes faded back into my consciousness, and it was over. The
group was invited to sit around a table and draw mandalas with crayons on
what they’d just experienced. I walked outside into the perfumed evening
air and drank a warm beer alone in the passenger seat of my car. On one hand, Holotropic Breathwork was transformative for Ben and
Mary, and hundreds of thousands of others who’d experienced it. On the
other, there was obviously some psychosomatic influence going on there. I
couldn’ t help wondering how much of its curative ef fects were the result of
the environment, of the “set and setting,” and how much might be a
measurable, physical response to breathing so heavily for so long. Grof believed that at least some visual and introspective experiences
were triggered by having less oxygen in the brain. —
During rest, about 750 milliliters of blood—enough to fill a full wine bottle
—flows through the brain every minute. Blood flow can increase a littleduring exercise just as it does in other parts of the body, but it will usually
stay consistent. That changes when we breathe heavily. Whenever the body is forced to
take in more air than it needs, we’ll exhale too much carbon dioxide, which
will narrow the blood vessels and decrease circulation, especially in the
brain. W ith just a few minutes, or even seconds, of overbreathing, brain
blood flow can decrease by 40 percent, an incredible amount. The areas most af fected by this are the brain’ s hippocampus and frontal,
occipital, and parieto-occipital cortices, which, together, govern functions
such as visual processing, body sensory information, memory, the
experience of time, and the sense of self. Disturbances in these areas can
elicit powerful hallucinations, which include out-of-body experiences and
waking dreams. If we keep breathing a little faster and deeper, more blood
will drain from the brain, and the visual and auditory hallucinations will
become more profound. In addition, the sustained pH imbalance in the blood sends distress
signals throughout the body, specifically to the limbic system, which
controls emotions, arousal, and other instincts. Consciously sustaining these
stress signals long enough may trick the more primitive limbic system into
thinking the body is dying. This could explain why so many people
experience sensations of death and rebirth during Holotropic Breathwork. They have consciously driven their bodies into a state that it perceives as
potentially lethal, and then lulled it back out by conscious breathing. Grof admitted that researchers were a long way from really
understanding the full picture. He was OK with that; he just knew
Holotropic Breathwork of fered a heavy shove that so many patients needed
but weren’ t getting with other therapies. Heavy breathing alone did for them
what nothing else could do. Nine
HOLD IT
In 1968, Dr. Arthur Kling left his of fice at the University of Illinois Medical
College and caught a flight to Cayo Santiago, a wild and unpopulated island
on Puerto Rico’ s southeast coast. He grabbed some traps, captured a group
of wild monkeys, then took the animals back to the lab to conduct a bizarre
and cruel experiment. Kling began by opening the monkey’ s skulls and
removed a dollop of brain from each side. He let the monkeys recover, then
released them back into the jungle. Beyond a few scars on their heads, the monkeys looked normal, but
something was wrong inside their brains. They had trouble navigating the
world. Some starved to death. Others drowned. A few were quickly
devoured by other animals. W ithin two weeks, all of Kling’ s monkeys were
dead. A couple years later, Kling traveled to Zambia, just upstream from
V ictoria Falls, and repeated the experiment. W ithin seven hours of releasing
the altered monkeys back into the wild, all had disappeared. The monkeys all died because they couldn’ t recognize which animals
were prey and which were predators. They didn’ t sense the danger of
wading into a rushing river, swinging from a thin branch, or approaching a
rival troop. The animals had no sense of fear, because Kling had removed
fear from their brains. Specifically, Kling had clipped out the monkeys’ amygdalae, two
almond-size nodes at the center of the temporal lobes. The amygdalae help
monkeys, humans, and other high-order vertebrates remember, make
decisions, and process emotions. These nodes are also believed to be the
alarm circuit of fear, signaling threats and initiating a reaction to fight orrun away. W ithout the amygdalae, Kling wrote, all the monkeys “appeared
retarded in their ability to foresee and avoid dangerous confrontations. ”
W ithout fear, survival was impossible, or, at minimum, extremely
precarious. —
Back in the United States, a girl whom psychologists would name S. M. was born around this time with a rare genetic condition called Urbach-
W iethe disease. The condition caused cell mutations and a buildup of fatty
material throughout her body, giving her skin a lumpy and puf fy appearance
and making her voice hoarse. When S.
The author's heart rate increased, and he felt anxious and paranoid.
What was the reaction of the audience when the author first tried the Inner Fire Meditation technique?
The scan showed an increase in bone growth in his cheeks and right eye socket, and an improvement in his jaw alignment and airway function.
What was the result of the experiment where the author was scanned after wearing the retainer for a year?
Dr. Stephen Porjes.
Who is the researcher that has studied the autonomic nervous system and its response to stress?
Holotropic Breathwork
What is the name of the breathing technique that was used to treat patients with anxiety and panic disorders?
Dr. Justin Feinstein
What is the name of the professor who has been studying the effects of carbon dioxide on patients with anxiety disorders?