—
Breathholding hacks, or , as Feinstein would call them, carbon dioxide
therapies, have been around for thousands of years. The ancient Romans
prescribed soaking in thermal baths (which contained high levels of carbon
dioxide that was absorbed through the skin) as a cure for anything from
gout to war wounds. Centuries later , Belle Époque French gathered at
thermal springs at Royat in the French Alps to wade in bubbling waters for
days at a time. “ The study of the chemical composition of the four mineral springs at
Royat will show that we have several powerful agents at our command, and
that much is available for the treatment of many morbid conditions, which
resist the usual pharmaceutical applications we make use of in daily
practice,” wrote Geor ge Henry Brandt, a British doctor who visited in the
late 1870s. Brandt was talking about skin disorders like eczema and
psoriasis, along with respiratory maladies like asthma and bronchitis, all of
which were “ cured almost with certainty” after a few sessions. *
Royat physicians would eventually bottle up carbon dioxide and
administer it as an inhalant. The therapy was so ef fective that it made it
stateside in the early 1900s. A mixture of 5 percent carbon dioxide and the
rest oxygen made popular by Y ale physiologist Y andell Henderson was
used with great success to treat strokes, pneumonia, asthma, and asphyxia
in newborn babies. Fire departments in New Y ork, Chicago, and other
major cities installed carbon dioxide tanks on their trucks. The gas was
credited with saving many lives. All the while, blends of 30 percent carbon dioxide and 70 percent
oxygen became a go-to treatment for anxiety , epilepsy , and evenschizophrenia. W ith a few huf fs of the stuf f, patients who’d spent months or
years in a catatonic state would suddenly come to. They’d open their eyes,
look around, and begin calmly talking with doctors and other patients. “It was a wonderful feeling. It was marvelous. I felt very light and didn’ t
know where I was,” one patient reported. “I knew something had happened
to me and I wasn’ t sure what it was.”
The patients would stay in this coherent, lucid state for about 30
minutes, until the carbon dioxide wore of f. Then, without warning, they’d
stop mid-sentence and freeze, staring into space and striking statue-like
poses or sometimes collapsing. The patients were sick again. They’d stay
that way until the next hit of carbon dioxide. And then, for reasons nobody quite understands, by the 1950s, a century
of scientific research disappeared. Those with skin disorders turned to pills
and creams; those with asthma managed symptoms with steroids and
bronchodilators. Patients with severe mental disorders were given sedatives. The drugs never cured schizophrenia or other psychoses, but they didn’ t
provoke out-of-body experiences or feelings of euphoria, either . They
numbed patients, and continued to numb them for weeks, months, and years
—as long as they kept taking them. —
“What’ s interesting to me is that nobody disproved it,” says Feinstein of
carbon dioxide therapy . “The data, the science, still holds today .”
He tells me how he’d stumbled upon some obscure studies by Joseph
W olpe, a renowned psychiatrist who rediscovered carbon dioxide therapy as
a treatment for anxiety and had written an influential paper about it in the
1980s. W olpe’ s patients shared stunning and long-lasting improvements
after just a few huf fs. Donald Klein, another renowned psychiatrist and
expert in panic and anxiety , suggested years later that the gas might help
reset the chemoreceptors in the brain, allowing patients to breathe normally
so they could think normally . Since then, few researchers have studied the
treatments. (Feinstein estimates there are about five researching it now .) He
just kept wondering if the early researchers were right, if this ancient gas
might be a remedy to modern ailments. “As a psychologist, I think, what are my options, what is the best
treatment for these patients?” Feinstein says.Pills, he tells me, of fer a false promise and do little good for most
people. Anxiety disorders and depression are the most common mental
illnesses in the United States, and about half of us will suf fer from one or
the other in our lifetime. T o help cope, 13 percent of us over the age of 12
will use antidepressants, most often selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,
also known as SSRIs. These drugs have been lifesavers for millions,
especially those with severe depression and other serious conditions. But
less than half the patients who take them get any benefits. *  “I keep asking
myself,” says Feinstein, “Is this the best we can do?”
Feinstein had explored various non-pharmaceutical therapies; he’d spent
a decade learning and teaching mindfulness meditation. A wealth of
scientific research shows that meditation can change the structure and
function of critical areas of the brain, help relieve anxieties, and boost focus
and compassion. It can work wonders, but few of us will ever reap these
rewards, because the vast majority of people who try to meditate will give
up and move on. For those with chronic anxieties, the percentages are far
worse. “Mindful meditation—as it is typically practiced—is just no longer
conducive to the new world we live in,” Feinstein explains. Another option, exposure therapy , is a technique that exposes patients
repeatedly to their fears so that they become more accepting of them. It’ s
highly ef fective but takes a while, usually involving many long sessions
over weeks or months. Finding psychologists with that kind of time, and
patients with the necessary resources, can be a challenge. But everyone breathes, and, today , few of us breathe well. Those with
the worst anxieties consistently suf fer from the worst breathing habits. People with anorexia or panic or obsessive-compulsive disorders
consistently have low carbon dioxide levels and a much greater fear of
holding their breath. T o avoid another attack, they breathe far too much and
eventually become hypersensitized to carbon dioxide and panic if they
sense a rise in this gas. They are anxious because they’re overbreathing,
overbreathing because they’re anxious. Feinstein found some inspiring recent studies by Alicia Meuret, the
Southern Methodist University psychologist who helped her patients blunt
asthma attacks by slowing their breathing to increase their carbon dioxide. This technique worked for panic attacks, too. In a randomized controlled trial, she and a group of researchers gave 20
panic suf ferers capnometers, which recorded the amount of carbon dioxidein their breath throughout the day . Meuret crunched the data and found that
panic, like asthma, is usually preceded by an increase in breathing volume
and rate and a decrease in carbon dioxide. T o stop the attack before it
struck, subjects breathed slower and less, increasing their carbon dioxide. This simple and free technique reversed dizziness, shortness of breath, and
feelings of suf focation. It could ef fectively cure a panic attack before the
attack came on. “‘T ake a deep breath’ is not a helpful instruction,” Meuret
wrote. Hold your breath is much better . —
W e leave Feinstein’ s of fice and stroll through a labyrinth of elevators and
staircases until we enter through soundproofed double doors. This is
Feinstein’ s lair . Through the door to the right, he and his team conduct
research on floatation, a therapy that involves lying in a salt-water pool in a
dark, soundless room. Through the door to the left is Feinstein’ s newest
project: a carbon dioxide therapy laboratory . It’ s a tiny windowless box that
looks as if it might have held HV AC equipment at one point. W e squeeze
into the space like clowns in a phone booth. On a folding desk is the usual
array of monitors, computers, wires, EKGs, capnometers, and other stuf f
I’ve grown accustomed to wearing over the past few years. A beat-up
yellow cylinder that looks like a Cold W ar–era Russian missile sits in the
corner . Feinstein tells me it holds 75 pounds of pure carbon dioxide. For the past few months, as part as his NIH research, Feinstein has
brought in patients suf fering with anxiety and panic to this lab and given
them a few hits of carbon dioxide. So far , he tells me, the results have been
promising. Sure, the gas elicited a panic attack in most patients, but this is
all part of the baptism-by-fire process. After that initial bout of discomfort,
many patients report feeling relaxed for hours, even days. I’ve decided to throw my chemoreceptors into the ring. I’ve signed up to
see what a few heavy doses of carbon dioxide would do to my own body
and brain. Feinstein sticks a piece of white foamy material with a metal sensor on
my middle and ring fingers. This device, called a galvanic skin conductance
meter , will measure small amounts of sweat released during states of
sympathetic stress. On my other hand, a pulse oximeter will record my
heart rate and oxygen levels.The mixture I’ll inhale is 35 percent carbon dioxide, and the rest is room
air—about the same percentage of carbon dioxide once used to test
schizophrenics, sans the oxygen. Feinstein administered this same dose on
S. M., who panicked and hated it. He also tried it out on a few patients early
on, but they too suf fered heavy panic attacks. Some patients were so
freaked out they refused to take another hit, so Feinstein now reduces the
dose to 15 percent—enough to give the chemoreceptors a good workout,
but not enough to keep patients from coming back for more. Since I didn’ t
suf fer from panic attacks or chronic anxiety , not yet at least, he of fered to
crank up my dose to the S. M. level to see what happens. He calmly explains, for the third time today , that any suf focation I might
feel after inhaling the gas is only an illusion, that my oxygen levels will
remain unchanged, and that I’ll be in no danger . Although he means to calm
my fears, the constant disclaimers only make me more, well, anxious. “Y ou good?” Feinstein says, tightening the V elcro straps on the face
mask. I nod, take a few last, sweet inhales of room air , and sink deeper in
the chair . W e’ll begin takeof f in two minutes. As Feinstein walks over to a computer and futzes with cables and tubes
and wires, I’m left to sit, stare at my cuticles, and reminisce a bit. My mind
wanders to last year , when I first visited Anders Olsson in Stockholm. —
It was just after our interview in the co-working reception hall, and Olsson
took me into his of fice, a little hovel filled with research papers, pamphlets,
and face masks. A beat-up carbon dioxide tank stood amid the rubble. Olsson told me that he and a group of DIY pulmonauts had been running
their own experiments with carbon dioxide over the past couple of years. They weren’ t interested in the megadoses used to treat epilepsy and mental
disorders. Olsson and his crew weren’ t sick. They were interested in
exploring the preventative and performance benefits of the gas, in flexing
their chemoreceptors even wider so that they could push their bodies
further . The most ef fective and safest blend they found was a few huf fs of
around 7 percent carbon dioxide mixed with room air . This was the “ super
endurance” level Buteyko found in the exhaled breath of top athletes. Breathing in this mixture had none of the hallucinogenic or panic-inducingef fects. Y ou hardly noticed it, and yet it of fered potent results. Olsson
shared some reports from pulmonauts in the field. User #1:  “So I’m in T oronto now and I decided to go for a rollerblade. I’m
a big rollerblader and have done this route by the water on
lakeshore many times before. But get this: No matter [how] hard I
pushed it, and I pretty much gave it 110% the entire time . . . I not
once needed to open my mouth to pant!”
User #2:  “I did some carbon dioxide treatments 3 times yesterday , about 15
minutes a piece. And today , I went canoeing and then when I had
sex with my girlfriend . . . by the end of it she was panting and
tired, and I wasn’ t even out of breath at all! I felt like I was
superhuman!”
User #3:  “Holy fuck! . . . I was breathing . . . and I started to feel fricking
AMAZing. Euphoric even. T o the point where breathing felt
automatic.”
Olsson hooked up the tank and of fered me a few huf fs. I felt a slight
spaciness, which was soon followed by a slight headache. I was
unimpressed. •       •       •
Back in T ulsa, Feinstein is about to administer something else entirely . It’ s
several times what I’d had before and several thousand times more than my
chemoreceptors are normally exposed to. He reaches over and points to the big red button on the desk. It switches
the air hose from room air to the carbon dioxide in a foil bag hanging on the
wall. The bag is a precautionary device. I’ll be huf fing from it instead of
directly out of the tank, in case there’ s a malfunction in the system, or in my
brain. Should a faucet stay open or should I suddenly start panicking
uncontrollably , I’ll only be able to breathe the contents inside the bag,
which works out to about three big huf fs. Next to the red button is a stress dial. It will record my perceived
anxiety . It’ s currently set to 1, the lowest level. When I start feeling anxiousafter inhaling the gas, I can crank the dial as far up as 20, marking an
extreme state of panic. Over the next 20 minutes, I’ll need to take three big inhales of carbon
dioxide. I can take all three breaths one after the other if I’m feeling
comfortable. If I’m not, I can wait several minutes between hits. The
amount of time patients wait provides insight into how intense the
experience was. Strapped in and ready , I’m trying to calm myself, watching the live feed
of my vitals on the computer monitor . As I inhale, my heart rate increases,
then decreases with every exhale, making a smooth sine wave across the
screen. Oxygen hovers at around 98 percent, and exhaled carbon dioxide
holds steady at 5.5 percent. All systems are go. It feels like I’m a fighter pilot on a stealth mission, hissing Darth V ader
breaths through a face mask, my hand on a missile-release button. Not the
kind of scene I’d ever associated with mental health therapy . But Feinstein’ s
goal isn’ t to change the way a patient feels on an emotional level. It’ s to
reset the basic mechanics of the primitive brain. Chemoreceptors, after all, don’ t care if the carbon dioxide in the
bloodstream is generated from strangulation, drowning, panic, or a foil bag
on a wall in T ulsa. They set of f the same alarm bells. Experiencing such an
attack in a controlled environment helps demystify it, teaching patients
what an attack feels like before it comes on so we can prevent it. It gives us
conscious power over what for too long has been considered an
unconscious ailment, and shows us that many of the symptoms we’re
suf fering can be caused, and controlled, by breathing. One more slow and deep inhale, a thumbs-up, and I close my eyes and
push all the air from my lungs. I punch the red button and hear the hose
engage to the foil bag, then take in an enormous breath. The air tastes metallic. It oozes into my mouth, zinging my tongue and
gums with the sensation of drinking orange juice from an aluminum cup. The gas pushes deeper , down my throat, coating my innards with what feels
like a sheet of aluminum foil. It cracks through the bronchioles, into the
alveoli, and into the bloodstream. I brace myself for the hit. One second. T wo seconds. Three. Nothing. I feel no dif ferent than I did
a few seconds ago or a few minutes before that. I hold the stress dial at 1. Feinstein said this might happen. He’d given this heavy dose to a W im
Hof practitioner months earlier , and the man barely felt anything. After somuch heavy breathing and breathholding, Feinstein hypothesized this
subject had already flexed his chemoreceptors wide open. Meanwhile, I had
just come of f ten days of forced mouthbreathing followed by ten days of
forced nasal breathing. I’d raised my resting carbon dioxide levels by 20
percent. I too have probably flexed my chemoreceptors as far as they could
reasonably go. Amid these thoughts, I feel a slight constriction in my throat. It’ s subtle. I take in a breath of room air , push out an exhale. This requires some ef fort. The red button is switched of f; I’m no longer breathing any more of the
carbon dioxide mixture, but it feels like someone has jammed a sock in my
mouth. I try to take another breath, but the sock keeps growing. OK, now there’ s a pounding in my temples. I open my eyes to check my
levels, but the room is blurry . A few seconds later , I’m viewing the world
through what looks like cracked and dirty binoculars. I can’ t breathe. Every
sense feels as if it’ s being torn from my control, vacuumed out. Maybe 10 or 20 seconds pass before the sock shrinks, there’ s a cooling
at the back of my neck, and the whirlpool of anxiety reverses and floats of f.
The color and clarity of my vision ripples outward, like a hand clearing mist
from a window . Feinstein stands a few feet from me, staring. It all comes
back to life. I can breathe again. I sit there for a few minutes sweating, kind of laughing, kind of crying. I’m trying to prepare myself for two more inhales of this ghastly mixture of
gas over the next 15 minutes. Any self-talk I can muster— This choking is
just an illusion; r elax, it will only last a few minutes— does nothing. After all, the fear I had just felt and would feel again with the next hit
won’ t be mental. It’ s mechanical; and conditioning the chemoreceptors to
widen takes a few sessions, which is why Feinstein’ s patients come back to
re-up over the course of a few days. This is, at its core, an exposure therapy . The more I expose myself to this gas, the more resilient I’ll be when I’m
overloaded. And so, in the name of research, and for the sake of my own future
chemoreceptor flexibility , I push the red button and take two more hits, one
after the other . And I panic, again and again.Ten
FAST, SLOW, AND NOT AT ALL
Eight hundred thousand commuters make their way down Paulista A venue
every day , and it shows. The lanes are gridlocked with compact cars and
rusting scooters, the sidewalks are a rushing river of men in candy-colored
dress shirts, women carrying on intense speakerphone conversations, and
schoolgirls wearing T -shirts that their parents certainly didn’ t translate into
English: I Give Zer o Fucks , PornFr eak , and I Got Zer o Chill in Me . Every few blocks, there’ s a newsstand selling the requisite
Cosmopolitan  and Playboy , but also Nietzsche and T rotsky manifestos,
collections of Charles Bukowski’ s dirty poetry , and V olume 1 of Marcel
Proust’ s 1,056-page ramble, Remembrance of Things Past . More honks, a
screech of wheels, someone yells something to someone, the light turns
green, and we all make our way across the vast intersection, deeper into a
canyon of mirrored buildings. I’ve come here, to downtown São Paulo, Brazil, to meet with a
renowned expert on the foundations of yoga, a man named Luíz Sér gio
Álvares DeRose. The yoga DeRose studies and teaches is an ancient
practice, vastly dif ferent from the yoga at neighborhood studios. It was
developed before yoga was even called yoga, before it was an aerobic
exercise or had spiritual connotations . . . at a time when it was a
technology of breathing and thinking. I’ve come to meet with DeRose because after all this research, after so
many years of reading books and talking to experts, I’ve still got questions. First up, I want to know why the body heats up during T ummo and other
Breathing+ practices. The heavy dose of stress hormones could blunt the
pain of cold, but it can’ t stop damage to the skin, tissues, and the rest of thebody . Nobody knows how Maurice Daubard, W im Hof, and their followers
can sit naked in the snow for hours and not get hypothermia or frostbite. Even more confounding are the monks of both Bön and Buddhist
traditions, who practice a mellower version of T ummo that stimulates the
opposite physiological response. These monks don’ t huf f and puf f. Instead,
they sit cross-legged and breathe slow and less, inducing a state of extreme
relaxation and calm, reducing their metabolic rates by as much as 64
percent—the lowest number recorded in laboratory experiments. The
monks should be dead, or at least suf fering from extreme hypothermia. However , in this very relaxed state, they’re able to increase body
temperature by double digits and stay steaming hot in sub-zero
temperatures for hours. Another question that’ s been baf fling me is how heavy Breathing+
techniques like Holotropic Breathwork can induce such hypersurreal and
hallucinatory ef fects. After 15 minutes of conscious overbreathing, the
brain starts to compensate. In several studies, there appeared to be no
oxygen deprivation associated with conscious overbreathing practices after
an initial hit. All cognitive functions should be normal, but they certainly
are not. Researchers in the United States and Europe have spent decades sticking
nodes and probes into people trying to understand the hidden mechanism
behind these techniques. But nobody has found it; nobody can explain it. So I’ve decided to look backward, to the ancient texts of the Indians for
answers. Every technique I’ve studied and practiced over the past decade,
and every technique I’ve so far described in this book—from Coherent
Breathing to Buteyko, Stough’ s exhalations to breathholding—first
appeared in these age-old texts. The scholars who wrote them clearly knew
that breathing is more than just ingesting oxygen, expelling carbon dioxide,
and coaxing nervous systems. Our breath also contained another invisible
ener gy , more powerful and af fecting than any molecule known to W estern
science. DeRose supposedly knows all about it. He’ s written 30 books on the
oldest forms of yoga and breathing. He’ s been decorated with every royal
decree imaginable in Brazil, including Emeritus Advisor of the Order of
Parliamentarians, Grand Of ficer of the Order of the Noble Knights of São
Paulo, Counselor of the Brazilian Academy of Art, Culture, and History ,
and dozens more. These were decorations normally reserved for greatstatespeople. DeRose has them all, even something called a Great Necklace
of the Order of Merit from the East Indies. And now , as I cross over from Paulista on to Rua Bela Cintra, he is only
a few blocks away . •       •       •
Open up a book or website or article or Instagram feed on yoga and chances
are you’ll see the word prana , which translates to “life force” or “vital
ener gy .” Prana is, basically , an ancient theory of atoms. The concrete in
your driveway , clothes on your body , spouse clanking dishes in your
kitchen—they’re all made of swirling atomic bits. It’ s ener gy . It’ s prana. The concept of prana was first documented around the same time in
India and China, some 3,000 years ago, and became the bedrock of
medicine. The Chinese called it ch’i  and believed the body contained
channels that functioned like prana power lines connecting or gans and
tissues. The Japanese had their own name for prana, ki , as did the Greeks
( pneuma ), Hebrews ( ruah ), Iroquois ( or enda ), and so on. Dif ferent names, same premise. The more prana something has, the
more alive it is. Should this flow of ener gy ever become blocked, the body
would shut down and sickness would follow . If we lose so much prana that
we can’ t support basic body functions, we die. Over the millennia, these cultures developed hundreds— thousands —of
methods to maintain a steady flow of prana. They created acupuncture to
open up prana channels and yoga postures to awaken and distribute the
ener gy . Spicy foods contained lar ge doses of prana, which is one of the
reasons traditional Indian and Chinese diets are often hot. But the most powerful technique was to inhale prana: to breathe. Breathing techniques were so fundamental to prana that ch’i and ruah and
other ancient terms for ener gy are synonymous with respiration. When we
breathe, we expand our life force. The Chinese called their system of
conscious breathing qigong : qi , meaning “breath,” and gong , meaning
“work,” or , put together , breathwork. —
Through the past several centuries of medical advancements, W estern
science never observed prana, or even confirmed that it exists. But in 1970,a group of physicists took a stab at measuring its ef fects when a man named
Swami Rama walked into the Menninger Clinic in T opeka, Kansas, the
lar gest psychiatric training center in the country at the time. Rama was wearing a flowing white robe, a mala bead necklace, and
sandals, and had hair that drooped down past his shoulders. He spoke
eleven languages, ate mostly nuts, fruits, and apple juice, and claimed to
have hardly any material possessions. “At six-feet-one-inch and 170
pounds, and with a lot of ener gy for debate and persuasion, he was a
formidable figure,” wrote a staf f member . By the age of three, Rama was practicing yoga and breathing techniques
around his home in northern India. He’d later move to Himalayan
monasteries and study secret practices alongside Mahatma Gandhi, Sri
Aurobindo, and other Eastern luminaries. In his 20s, he headed west to
attend Oxford and other universities, then eventually set of f around the
world to teach the methods he’d learned from the masters to anyone who
cared to listen. In the spring of 1970, Rama was sitting at a wooden desk in a small,
pictureless of fice at the Menninger Clinic with an EKG over his heart and
EEG sensors on his forehead. Dr . Elmer Green stood over him inspecting
the equipment through Coke-bottle glasses. A former Navy weapons
physicist, Green headed the V oluntary Controls Program, a lab within the
clinic that investigated something called “psychophysiologic self-
regulation,” or what would become known as the mind/body connection. Green had heard about the extraordinary abilities of Indian meditators from
his colleagues and had seen data from a recent experiment with Rama at a
V eterans Administration hospital in Minnesota. Green wanted to confirm
the results with the latest scientific instruments; he wanted to observe the
power of prana for himself. Rama exhaled, calmed himself, lowered his thick eyelids, and then
began breathing, carefully controlling the air entering and exiting his body . The lines on the EEG readout grew longer and softer , from hyperactive beta
waves to calming and meditative alpha, and then to long and low delta, the
brain waves identified with deep sleep. Rama stayed in this comatose state
for a half hour , becoming so relaxed at one point that he began gently
snoring. When he “woke up,” he gave a detailed recap of the conversation
in the room that had occurred while he displayed brain waves of deep sleep.Rama didn’ t call it deep sleep, though. He called it “yogic sleep,” a state in
which the mind was active while the “brain slept.”
In the next experiment, Rama shifted his focus from his brain to his
heart. He sat motionless, breathed a few times, and then, when given a
signal, slowed his heart rate from 74 to 52 beats in less than 60 seconds. Later , he increased his heart rate from 60 to 82 beats within eight seconds. At one point, Rama’ s heart rate went to zero, and stayed there for 30
seconds. Green thought Rama had shut of f his heart completely , but upon
closer inspection of the EKG, he found that Rama had commanded it to
beat at 300 beats per minute . Blood can’ t move through the chambers when the heart beats this fast. For this reason, the phenomenon, called atrial flutter , usually results in
cardiac arrest and death. But Rama seemed unaf fected. He claimed that he
could maintain this state for a half hour . The results of the experiment were
later reported in The New Y ork T imes. Rama went on to shift the prana (or blood flow , or both) to other parts of
his body , willing it from one side of his hand to the other . W ithin 15
minutes, he was able to create a temperature dif ference of 11 degrees
between his little finger and thumb. Rama’ s hands never moved. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, pH levels, and stress hormones played no part
in Rama’ s abilities. As far as is known, his blood gases and nervous system
were normal throughout each of the experiments. There was some other
strange prana force at play , some more subtle ener gy Rama had harnessed. Dr . Green and the Menninger team knew it was there; they’d measured its
ef fects on Rama’ s body and brain. They just had no way to calculate it with
any of their machines. By the early 1970s, Swami Rama had become a bona fide breathing
superstar , with his bushy eyebrows and laser -beam eyes showing up in
T ime , Playboy , Esquir e , and, later , on daytime television talk shows like
Donahue. Nobody in the W estern world had seen anything like him before. But it turned out Rama wasn’ t that special. A French cardiologist named Thérèse Brosse had recorded a yogi doing
the same thing Rama did forty years earlier: stopping and starting his heart
on demand. A researcher named M. A. W enger , at the University of
California, Los Angeles, repeated the tests and found yogis who could
control not only the beat and pulse strength of their hearts but also the flow
of sweat on their foreheads and the temperature of their fingertips. SwamiRama’ s “superhuman” abilities weren’ t superhuman at all. They’d been
standard practice for hundreds of generations of Indian yogis. Rama revealed some of his secrets of prana control in group lessons and
videos. He recommended students begin by harmonizing their breathing, by
removing the pause between inhalations and exhalations so that every
breath was one line connected with no end. When this practice felt
comfortable, he instructed them to lengthen the breaths. Once a day , they were to lie down, take a brief inhale, and then exhale to
a count of 6. As they progressed, they could inhale to a count of 4 and
exhale to 8, with the goal of reaching a half-minute exhale after six months
of practice. Upon reaching this 30 count, Rama promised his students, they
“will not have any toxins and will be disease-free.” In an instructional
video, gently stroking his own arm, he said, “Y our body will look like
smooth body , like silk, you see?”
Infusing the body with prana is simple: you just breathe. But controlling
this ener gy and directing it took a while. Rama obviously had learned
something much more powerful in the Himalayas, but as far as I could tell
in his books and dozens of instructional videos, he never elaborated. •       •       •
The best possible explanation I could find of what the “vital substance” of
prana might be and how it might work came not from a yogi but from a
Hungarian scientist who nearly flunked out of school as a child, shot
himself in the arm to get out of serving in W orld W ar I, and later earned a
Nobel Prize for groundbreaking work on vitamin C.
His name was Albert Szent-Györ gyi, and in the 1940s he’d made his
way to the United States and would end up heading the National
Foundation for Cancer Research, where he spent years investigating the role
of cellular respiration. It was there, working in his laboratory in W oods
Hole, Massachusetts, that he proposed an explanation for the subtle ener gy
that drives all life and everything else in the universe. “ All living or ganisms are but leaves on the same tree of life,” he wrote. “The various functions of plants and animals and their specialized or gans
are manifestations of the same living matter .”
Szent-Györ gyi wanted to understand the process of breathing, but not in
the physical or mental sense, or even at the molecular level. He wanted toknow how the breath we take into our bodies interacts with our tissues,
or gans, and muscles on a subatomic level. He wanted to know how life
gained ener gy from air . Everything around us is composed of molecules, which are composed of
atoms, which are composed of subatomic bits called protons (which have a
positive char ge), neutrons (no char ge), and electrons (negative char ge). All
matter is, at its most basic level, ener gy . “W e can not separate life from
living matter ,” Szent-Györ gyi wrote. “Inevitably , studying living matter and
its reactions, we study life itself.”
What distinguishes inanimate objects like rocks from birds and bees and
leaves is the level of ener gy , or the “excitability” of electrons within those
atoms that make up the molecules in matter . The more easily and often
electrons can be transferred between molecules, the more “desaturated”
matter becomes, the more alive  it is. Szent-Györ gyi studied the earliest life forms on Earth and deduced that
they were all made up of “weak electron acceptors,” which meant they
couldn’ t easily take in or release electrons. He ar gued that this matter had
less ener gy , so it had less chance to evolve. It just stayed there, mucking
around without ever doing much, for millions and millions of years. Eventually , oxygen, the byproduct of that muck, accumulated in the
atmosphere. Oxygen was a strong electron acceptor . As new muck evolved
to consume oxygen, it attracted and exchanged many more electrons than
older , anaerobic life. W ith this surplus of ener gy , early life evolved
relatively quickly into plants, insects, and everything else. “ The living state
is such an electronically desaturated state,” wrote Szent-Györ gyi. “Nature is
simple but subtle.”
This premise can be applied to life on the planet today . The more
oxygen life can consume, the more electron excitability it gains, the more
animated it becomes. When living matter is bristling and able to absorb and
transfer electrons in a controlled way , it remains healthy . When cells lose
the ability to of fload and absorb electrons, they begin to break down. “T aking out electrons irreversibly means killing,” wrote Szent-Györ gyi. This breakdown of electron excitability is what causes metal to rust and
leaves to turn brown and die. Humans “rust” as well. As the cells in our bodies lose the ability to
attract oxygen, Szent-Györ gyi wrote, electrons within them will slow and
stop freely interchanging with other cells, resulting in unregulated andabnormal growth. T issues will begin “rusting” in much the same way as
other materials. But we don’ t call this “tissue rust.” W e call it cancer . And
this helps explain why cancers develop and thrive in environments of low
oxygen. The best way to keep tissues in the body healthy was to mimic the
reactions that evolved in early aerobic life on Earth—specifically , to flood
our bodies with a constant presence of that “strong electron acceptor”:
oxygen. Breathing slow , less, and through the nose balances the levels of
respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to
the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount
of electron reactivity . “ In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was
accomplished by moving ener gy ,” said Szent-Györ gyi. The moving ener gy
of electrons allows living things to stay alive and healthy for as long as
possible. The names may have changed—prana, orenda, ch’i, ruah—but the
principle has remained the same. Szent-Györ gyi apparently took that
advice. He died in 1986, at the age of 93. •       •       •
A knock, a swing of the door , a few exchanged bom dia s, and I take a seat
in the lobby of the reception area of DeRose’ s studio complex. There are
wood floors and puf fy sofas, white walls and framed posters of world maps. A sign at the center of the room reads “Stop and Breathe . ”
A gaggle of DeRose teachers and students are lounging and giggling in
Portuguese at the center of the lobby while they sip chai tea from ceramic
cups. Heduan Pinheiro is among them. He’ s wearing a creaseless shirt and
white pants and resembles a 1980s teen sitcom star . Pinheiro has graciously
of fered to take time away from his busy schedule operating two DeRose
Method studios just north of here to be my guide and translator . W e walk
through the reception area and up a dark staircase to meet the man he calls
“The Master .”
The small of fice is decorated with medals and silver swords, each
emblazoned with the kinds of Masonic pyramids and eyeballs you see on
the backs of dollar bills and on old buildings. “They just give me these
things, I don’ t know why!” says DeRose, vigorously shaking my hand. He’ s
powerfully built, with a neatly trimmed white beard and wide brown eyes.The shelves behind him are filled with copies of the books he’ s sold by the
millions on pranayama, karma, and other secrets of ancient yoga. I’ve read
a few of them and found no surprises, no secret breathing method I hadn’ t
already known about and tried over the past several years. That wasn’ t surprising, either . The history of yoga and the earliest
breathing techniques is long established. But now , finally here, I am eager
to compare notes with DeRose. I’m eager to see what he knows about prana
and the lost art and science of breathing that I don’ t.
“Shall we begin?” he says. •       •       •
If you were to travel back in time some 5,000 years to the borders of what is
now Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwestern India, you’d see sand, rocky
mountains, dusty trees, red soil, and wide-open plains, the same landscape
that now covers most of the Middle East. But you’d also find something
else: five million people living in cities of baked-brick tract houses, roads
meticulously constructed in geometric patterns, and children playing with
copper , bronze, and tin toys. Between the cul-de-sacs, you’d see public
bathing pools with running water , and toilets piped to complex sanitation
systems. In the marketplace, you’d see tradespeople measuring goods with
weights and standardized rulers, sculptors carving elaborate figures into
stone, and ceramists throwing pots and tablets. This was the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, named after the two rivers that
flowed through the valley . The Indus-Sarasvati was the lar gest
geographically—some 300,000 square miles—and one of the most
advanced of ancient human civilizations. As far as is known, the Indus
V alley had no churches or temples or sacred spaces. The people who lived
there produced no praying sculptures, no iconography . Palaces, castles, and
imposing governmental buildings didn’ t exist. There was, perhaps, no belief
in God. But the people here believed in the transformative power of breathing. A
seal engraving unearthed from the civilization in the 1920s depicts a man in
an unmistakable pose. He’ s sitting erect with his arms outstretched and
hands with thumbs in front placed on his knees. His legs are crossed and the
soles of his feet are joined, the toes pointing down. His belly is filled with
air , as he consciously inhales. Several other unearthed figures share thissame posture. These artifacts are the first documented “yogic” postures in
human history , which makes sense. The Indus V alley was the birthplace of
yoga. Things seemed to be going so well in the region, until around 2000 BCE ,
when a drought hit, causing much of the population to disperse. Then
Aryans from the northwest moved in. These weren’ t the blond-haired, blue-
eyed soldiers of Nazi lore but black-haired barbarians from Iran. The
Aryans took the Indus-Sarasvati culture and codified, condensed, and
rewrote it in their native language of Sanskrit. It’ s from these Sanskrit
translations that we get the V edas, religious and mystical texts that contain
the earliest known documentation of the word “yoga.” In two texts based on
V edic teachings, the Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya Upanishads, are
the earliest lessons of breathing and the control of prana. Over the next few thousand years, the ancient breathing methods spread
throughout India, China, and beyond. By around 500 BCE , the techniques
would be filtered and synthesized into the Y oga Sutras of Patanjali. Slow
breathing, breathholding, deep breathing into the diaphragm, and extending
exhalations all first appear in this ancient text. A broad interpretation of a
passage from Y oga Sutra 2.51 reads:
When a wave comes, it washes over you and runs up the beach. Then, the wave turns around, and recedes over you, going back
to the ocean. . . . This is like the breath, which exhales,
transitions, inhales, transitions, and then starts the process again. There is no mention in the Y oga Sutras of moving between or even
repeating poses. The Sanskrit word asana  originally meant “seat” and
“posture.” It referred both to the act of sitting and the material you sit on. What it specifically did not  mean was to stand up and move about. The
earliest yoga was a science of holding still and building prana through
breathing. —
DeRose got a taste for this kind of ancient yoga in the 1970s, when he was
traveling through India trying to piece together the earliest practices of the
Indus V alley . He’d attended a class in the foothills of the Himalayas, inRishikesh, India. The studio was very basic, with a dirt floor , and filled with
villagers seeking to warm themselves during cold days. The classes were casual and the relationship between students and
teachers was respectful, yet light. T eachers joked with students during
exercises; students joked back. “Push yourself!” the instructors would yell
in gruf f and direct voices. “Y ou can do better than that!” There were no
“gymnastics, anti-gymnastics, bioener getics, occultism, spiritism, zen,
dance, body expression, macrobiotics, shiatsu,” DeRose would recall. Poses
were done once and held for an excruciatingly long time. These long
postures allowed students to focus entirely on their breathing. The class was
dif ficult, and at the end of it DeRose was sweaty and sore. “Nothing like yoga today ,” he says from across the desk. He tells me
that only in the twentieth century would yoga poses be combined and
repeated into a kind of aerobic dance called “vinyasa flow .” It’ s this form of
yoga and other hybridized techniques that are now taught in gyms, studios,
and classrooms. Ancient yoga, and its focus on prana, sitting, and breathing,
has turned into a form of aerobic exercise. That isn’ t to say modern yoga is bad in any way . It is simply a dif ferent
practice from the one that first originated 5,000 years ago. An estimated
two billion people now practice this modern form because it makes them
feel better and look better and stay more flexible in all the ways stretching
and exercise does. Hundreds of studies have confirmed the healing benefits
of vinyasa flow and asanas, standing up and otherwise. But what have we lost? DeRose would spend 20 years flying from Brazil to India, learning
Sanskrit and digging up ancient yoga texts “inch by inch, through centuries
of debris,” he wrote. He found confirmation of the original practices as
“Yôga” (pronounced yoooooga ), which comes from the ancient
Niríshwarasámkhya lineage, a practice and philosophy so dif ferent from the
modern version that DeRose believes it deserves to be referred to by its
ancient name. Yôga practices were never designed to cure problems, he tells me. They
were created for healthy people to climb the next rung of potential: to give
them the conscious power to heat themselves on command, expand their
consciousness, control their nervous systems and hearts, and live longer and
more vibrant lives.—
T oward the end of our hours-long meeting I tell DeRose about my
experience in that V ictorian house ten years ago, how I had practiced an
ancient pranayama technique called Sudarshan Kriya and was quickly
floored. I tell him how a mellower version of that reaction keeps happening
to me, and millions of others, whenever we use traditional yogic breathing. V ersions of kriya  had been around since 400 BCE , and by some accounts
were used by everyone from Krishna to Jesus Christ, Saint John to
Patanjali. The kriya I’d experienced was developed in the 1980s by a man
named Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and is now practiced by tens of millions of
people around the world through The Art of Living Foundation. It does
much of what T ummo does because, DeRose says, both were designed from
the same ancient practices. *
Sudarshan Kriya, too, was no picnic. It took time, dedication, and will
power . The central method, called Purifying Breath, requires more than 40
minutes of intensive breathing, from huf fing and at a rate of more than a
hundred breaths per minute, to several minutes of slow breathing, and then
hardly breathing at all. Rinse and repeat. I tell DeRose about the extreme sweating, complete loss of time, and
lightness I felt for days afterward. How I’d spent the last decade looking for
an explanation, conducting various lab experiments, analyzing my blood
gases, and scanning my brain. He sits calmly with his hands neatly folded. He’d heard it all so many
times. I’d found nothing in these readouts or scientific measurements, he
says, because I’ve been looking in the wrong place. It’ s ener gy; it’ s prana. What had happened was simple and common. I’d
built up too much prana breathing so heavily for so long, but I hadn’ t yet
adapted to it. This explained the waterworks and shift of consciousness. Sudarshan is derived from two words: su , meaning “good,” and darshan ,
meaning “vision.” In my case, I’d had a very good vision. Ancient yogis spent thousands of years honing pranayama techniques,
specifically to control this ener gy and distribute it throughout the body to
provoke their “good visions,” toned down a notch or two. This process
should take several months or years to master . Modern breathers like me
can try to hack this process and speed it up. But we will fail. Hallucinations,howling, soiling one’ s clothes: none of that was supposed to happen. It’ s a
sign we’ve gone overboard. The key to Sudarshan Kriya, T ummo, or any other breathing practice
rooted in ancient yoga is to learn to be patient, maintain flexibility , and
slowly absorb what breathing has to of fer . My initial experience with
Sudarshan Kriya may have been a bit jarring, DeRose says, but it also
convinced me of the sheer power of breathing. In the end, it’ s what brought me here. —
After a few more rounds of Q&A with DeRose, it’ s time for me to go. He
needs to pack his things and head back to New Y ork, where his colleagues
run two bustling DeRose Method studios in T ribeca and Greenwich V illage. I need to catch a 17-hour flight back home. W e exchange a few obrigado s, shake hands, and I follow Pinheiro, my
translator , past the glinting swords and red ribbons into the dark shadows of
the hallway . But before I leave, Pinheiro has of fered to teach me some of
the ancient Yôga breathing techniques DeRose is known for . W e hike up to the third floor , take of f our shoes, and step into the studio. The room is no dif ferent from any other yoga studio I’ve seen. There’ s blue
padding on the floor , wall-wide mirrors, bookshelves and Sanskrit posters. Pinheiro kneels cross-legged so that his body is centered between the
windows, casting a Buddha shadow across the room. I take a seat across
from him. A minute later , we begin to breathe. W e start with jiya pranayama, which involves curling the tongue to the
back of the mouth and holding the breath. W e run through some bhandas, a
method of redirecting and holding prana inside the body by contracting
muscles in the throat, abs, and other areas. Then I lie down in front of him
so that I’m looking up at the white acoustic tiles on the ceiling. The final
exercise I’ll be doing, he tells me, is intended to build prana in the body and
focus the mind. “Concentrate on just one fluid movement from inhale to exhale,” says
Pinheiro. These are the same instructions I’d heard in that Sudarshan Kriya
session way back when, the same instructions I learned from Anders Olsson
years later , and from W im Hof Method instructor Chuck McGee. I know
this process now; I know these ropes.I relax my throat and take a very deep inhale into the pit of my stomach,
then exhale completely . Inhale again, and repeat. “All the way in and all the way out,” says Pinheiro. “Keep going! Keep
breathing!”
•       •       •
There it is, again. And here I am, again. That ringing in the ears. The heavy-
metal double-bass drum thumping in my chest. The warm static flowing to
my shoulders and face. The wave comes, washes over and runs up, then
turns around and recedes, back to the ocean. I’ve felt this all before now , so many times. It’ s the same thing the
ancient people of the Indus V alley must have experienced 5,000 years ago,
and the ancient Chinese 2,000 years after them. Alexandra David-Néel
warmed herself with it in a cave in the Himalayas, and Swami Rama
focused it on his hands and heart. Buteyko rediscovered it by a window in
the asthma ward of the First Moscow Hospital, and Carl Stough taught it to
dying veterans at the V A Medical Center in New Jersey . As I breathe a little faster , go a little deeper , the names of all the
techniques I’ve explored over the past ten years all come back in a rush. Pranayama. Buteyko. Coher ent Br eathing. Hypoventilation. Br eathing Coor dination. Holotr opic Br eathwork. Adhama. Madhyama. Uttama. Kêvala. Embryonic Br eath. Harmonizing
Br eath. The Br eath by the Master Gr eat Nothing. T ummo. Sudarshan Kriya. The names may have changed over the years, the techniques may have
been repurposed and repackaged in dif ferent cultures at dif ferent times for
dif ferent reasons, but they were never lost. They’ve been inside us all this
time, just waiting to be tapped. They give us the means to stretch our lungs and straighten our bodies,
boost blood flow , balance our minds and moods, and excite the electrons in
our molecules. T o sleep better , run faster , swim deeper , live longer , and
evolve further .They of fer a mystery and magic of life that unfolds a little more with
every new breath we take.Epilogue
A LAST GASP
Nothing about this place had changed. The threadbare Persian rug. The
paint-chipped window that rattles in the breeze. The rumble of diesel trucks
chugging up Page Street and the jaundiced streetlight illuminating bits of
falling lint. A few of the faces are the same, too: there’ s the guy with
prisoner eyes, the other with Jerry Lewis bangs, and the blond woman with
an unplaceable Eastern European accent. I find my usual spot in the corner
and sit by the window . It’ s been ten years since I came to this room and felt the possibilities of
breathing. A decade of traveling, research, and self-experimentation. In that
time I’ve learned that the benefits of breathing are vast, at times
unfathomable. But they’re also limited. This became disturbingly clear several months ago. I was in Portland,
Oregon, and had just finished a lecture based on the contents of this book. I
left the podium and walked to the lobby to talk with a friend when a woman
approached. Her eyes were wide, fingers jittery . She told me her mother had
just suf fered a pulmonary embolism and desperately needed a breathing
technique to remove blood clots from her lungs. A few weeks later , a woman seated next to me on a flight noticed
photographs of skulls on my laptop. She asked what I was working on. After I told her , she explained how her friend was suf fering from a serious
eating disorder , osteoporosis, and cancer . No treatments had worked. She
asked if I could please prescribe a breathing practice to bring her friend
back to health. What I explained to each of these people, and what I’d like to make
clear now , is that breathing, like any therapy or medication, can’ t doeverything. Breathing fast, slow , or not at all can’ t make an embolism go
away . Breathing through the nose with a big exhale can’ t reverse the onset
of neuromuscular genetic diseases. No breathing can heal stage IV cancer . These severe problems require ur gent medical attention. I wouldn’ t be alive without antibiotics, immunizations, and a last-minute
rush to the doctor ’ s of fice to zap out a lymph node infection. The medical
technologies developed over the last century have saved innumerable lives. They have increased the quality of life around the world many times over . But modern medicine, still, has its limitations. “I’m dealing with the
walking dead,” said Dr . Michael Gelb, who’d spent 30 years working as a
dental sur geon and sleep specialist. He echoed what I’d heard from Dr . Don
Storey , my father -in-law , who’d worked as a pulmonologist for the past 40
years. Dozens of doctors at Harvard, Stanford, and other institutions told
me the same thing. Modern medicine, they said, was amazingly ef ficient at
cutting out and stitching up parts of the body in emer gencies, but sadly
deficient at treating milder , chronic systemic maladies—the asthma,
headaches, stress, and autoimmune issues that most of the modern
population contends with. These doctors explained, in so many words and in so many ways, that a
middle-aged man complaining of work stress, irritable bowels, depression,
and an occasional tingling in his fingers wasn’ t going to get the same
attention as a patient with kidney failure. He’d be prescribed a blood
pressure medication and an antidepressant and sent on his way . The role of
the modern doctor was to put out fires, not blow away smoke. Nobody was happy with this arrangement: doctors were frustrated that
they had neither the time nor the support to prevent and treat milder chronic
problems, while patients were learning that their cases weren’ t dire enough
for the attention they sought. This is one of the reasons I believe so many people, and so many
medical researchers, have come to breathing. Like all Eastern medicines, breathing techniques are best suited to serve
as preventative maintenance, a way to retain balance in the body so that
milder problems don’ t blossom into more serious health issues. Should we
lose that balance from time to time, breathing can often bring it back. “ More than sixty years of research on living systems has convinced me
that our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailmentssuggests,” wrote Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györ gyi. “Its shortcomings
are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it.”
Szent-Györ gyi was talking about sicknesses of our own making, or , as
anthropologist Robert Corruccini has called them, “diseases of civilization.”
Nine out of ten of the top killers, such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke
are caused by the food we eat, water we drink, houses we live in, and
of fices we work in. They are diseases humanity created. While some of us may be genetically predisposed toward one disease or
another , that doesn’ t mean we’re predestined to get these conditions. Genes
can be turned of f just as they can be turned on. What switches them are
inputs in the environment. Improving diet and exercise and removing toxins
and stressors from the home and workplace have a profound and lasting
ef fect on the prevention and treatment of the majority of modern, chronic
diseases. Breathing is a key input. From what I’ve learned in the past decade, that
30 pounds of air that passes through our lungs every day and that 1.7
pounds of oxygen our cells consume is as important as what we eat or how
much we exercise. Breathing is a missing pillar of health. “ If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would
be simply to learn how to breathe better ,” wrote Andrew W eil, the famed
doctor . Though researchers still have much to learn about this endlessly
expansive field, there is plenty of consensus right now about what
“breathing better” looks like. In a nutshell, this is what we’ve learned. SHUT YOUR MOUTH
T wo months after the Stanford experiment ended, Dr . Jayakar Nayak’ s lab
emailed Anders Olsson and me the results of our 20-day study . The major
takeaway we already knew: mouthbreathing is terrible. After just 240 hours of breathing only through our mouths,
catecholamine and stress-related hormones spiked, suggesting that our
bodies were under physical and mental duress. A diphtheroid
Corynebacterium  bug had also infested my nose. If I’d continued breathingonly through my mouth for a few more days, it might have developed into a
full-fledged sinus infection. All the while, my blood pressure was through
the roof and my heart rate variability plummeted. Olsson’ s data mirrored
mine. By night, the constant flow of unpressurized, unfiltered air flowing in
and out of our gaping mouths collapsed the soft tissue in our throats to such
an extent that we both began to experience persistent nocturnal suf focation. W e snored. A few days later , we started choking on ourselves, suf fering
from bouts of sleep apnea. Had we continued breathing through our mouths,
there’ s a decent chance we both would have developed chronic snoring and
obstructive sleep apnea, along with the hypertension and metabolic and
cognitive problems that come with it. Not all of our measurements changed. Blood sugar levels weren’ t
af fected. Cell counts in the blood and ionized calcium remained the same,
as did most other blood markers. There were a few surprises. My lactate levels, a measure of anaerobic
respiration, actually decreased with mouthbreathing, which suggested I was
using more oxygen-burning aerobic ener gy . This was the opposite of what
most fitness experts would have predicted. (Olsson’ s lactate slightly
increased.) I lost about two pounds, due most likely to exhaled water loss. But trust me on this: a post-holiday mouthbreathing diet is not
recommended. The nagging fatigue, irritation, testiness, and anxiety . The horrid breath
and constant bathroom breaks. The spaciness, stares, and stomachaches. It
was awful. The human body has evolved to be able to breathe through two channels
for a reason. It increases our chances of survival. Should the nose get
obstructed, the mouth becomes a backup ventilation system. The few
gasping breaths Stephen Curry takes before dunking a basketball, or a sick
kid huf fs when he has a fever , or you take in when you’re laughing with
your friends—this temporary mouthbreathing will have no long-term ef fects
on health. Chronic mouthbreathing is dif ferent. The body is not designed to
process raw air for hours at a time, day or night. There is nothing normal
about it.BREA THE THROUGH YOUR NOSE
The day Olsson and I removed the plugs and tape, our blood pressure
dropped, carbon dioxide levels rose, and heart rates normalized. Snoring
decreased 30-fold from the mouthbreathing phase, from several hours a
night to a few minutes. W ithin two days, neither of us was snoring at all. The bacterial infection in my nose quickly cleared up without treatment. Olsson and I had cured ourselves by breathing through our noses. Ann Kearney , the doctor of speech-language pathology at the Stanford
V oice and Swallowing Center , was so impressed by our data and her own
transformation overcoming congestion and mouthbreathing that, at this
writing, she is putting together a two-year study with 500 subjects to
research the ef fects of sleep tape on snoring and sleep apnea. The benefits of nasal breathing extended beyond the bedroom. I
increased my performance on the stationary bike by about 10 percent. (Olsson had more modest gains, about 5 percent.) These results paled in
comparison to the gains reported by sports training expert John Douillard,
but I couldn’ t imagine any athlete who wouldn’ t want a 10 percent—or
even a 1 percent—advantage over a competitor . On a more personal note, those first few nasal breaths after ten days of
obstruction were so shimmering and rousing that I got a little teary-eyed. I
thought about my interviews with all the empty nose syndrome suf ferers
who’d been told they were crazy , that they should just quit complaining and
breathe through their mouths. I thought about kids who’d been told that
chronic aller gies and congestion were a part of childhood, and the adults
who’d convinced themselves that choking every night was a natural part of
growing old. I had felt their pain, and was lucky enough to breathe life on the other
side. It’ s something I’ll never for get, and will never , ever repeat. EXHALE
Carl Stough spent a half century reminding his students of how to get all the
air out of our bodies so that we could take more in. He trained his clients toexhale longer and, in the process, do what had long been considered
biologically impossible. Emphysemics reported almost total recovery from
their incurable conditions, opera singers gained more resonance and tone in
their voices, asthmatics no longer suf fered from attacks, and Olympic
sprinters went on to win gold medals. As basic as this sounds, full exhalations are seldom practiced. Most of
us engage only a small fraction of our total lung capacity with each breath,
requiring us to do more and get less. One of the first steps in healthy
breathing is to extend these breaths, to move the diaphragm up and down a
bit more, and to get air out of us before taking a new one in. “ The dif ference in breathing in the coordinated pattern and in an altered
pattern is the dif ference between operating at peak ef ficiency and just
getting along,” Stough wrote in the 1960s. “An engine does not have to be
in tip-top condition to work, but it gives a better performance if it is.”
CHEW
The millions of ancient skeletons in the Paris quarries and hundreds of pre–
Industrial Age skulls at the Morton Collection had three things in common:
huge sinus cavities, strong jaws, and straight teeth. Almost all humans born
before 300 years ago shared these traits because they chewed a lot. The bones in the human face don’ t stop growing in our 20s, unlike other
bones in the body . They can expand and remodel into our 70s, and likely
beyond. Which means we can influence the size and shape of our mouths
and improve our ability to breathe at virtually any age. T o do this, don’ t follow the diet advice of eating what our great-
grandmothers ate. T oo much of that stuf f was already soft and overly
processed. Y our diet should consist of the rougher , rawer , and heartier foods
our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers ate. The kinds of foods
that required an hour or two a day of hard chewing. And in the meantime,
lips together , teeth slightly touching, and tongue on the roof of the mouth. BREA THE MORE, ON OCCASIONSince meeting Chuck McGee at that roadside park in the Sierras, I’ve been
practicing T ummo with dozens of others from around the world on Monday
nights. That’ s when McGee hosts a free online session open to anyone who
wants to “become the eye of the storm.”
Overbreathing has gotten a bad rap in the past few decades, and
rightfully so. Feeding the body more air than it needs is damaging for the
lungs right down to the cellular level. T oday , the majority of us breathe
more than we should, without realizing it. W illing yourself to breathe heavily for a short, intense time, however ,
can be profoundly therapeutic. “It’ s only through disruption that we can be
normal again,” McGee told me. That’ s what techniques like T ummo,
Sudarshan Kriya, and vigorous pranayamas do. They stress the body on
purpose, snapping it out of its funk so that it can properly function during
the other 23½ hours a day . Conscious heavy breathing teaches us to be the
pilots of our autonomic nervous systems and our bodies, not the passengers. HOLD YOUR BREA TH
Several months after experimenting with carbon dioxide therapy , I was at
home reading the Sunday paper , flipping through the obituaries, and saw
that Dr . Donald Klein had died. Klein was the psychiatrist who spent years
studying the links between chemoreceptor flexibility , carbon dioxide, and
anxieties. He was 90. It was Klein’ s research that inspired Justin Feinstein
to pursue the NIH-funded experiments in T ulsa. I wrote Feinstein with the news. He was crushed. He told me he’d been
planning on reaching out to Klein in the coming weeks regarding what
could be a “game-changing discovery .”
It turns out that the amygdalae, those gooey nodes on the sides of our
head that help govern perceptions of fear and emotions, also control aspects
of our breathing. Patients with epilepsy who have had these brain areas
stimulated with electrodes immediately cease breathing. The patients were
totally unaware of it and didn’ t seem to feel their carbon dioxide levels
rising long after their breathing ceased. Communication between the chemoreceptors and amygdalae works both
ways: these structures are constantly exchanging information and adjustingbreathing every second of every minute of the day . If communication breaks
down, havoc ensues. Feinstein believes that people with anxiety likely suf fer from connection
problems between these areas and could unwittingly be holding their breath
throughout the day . Only when the body becomes overwhelmed by carbon
dioxide would their chemoreceptors kick in and trigger an emer gency signal
to the brain to immediately get another breath. The patients would
reflexively start fighting to breathe. They’d panic. Eventually their bodies adapt to avoid such unexpected attacks by
staying in a state of alert, by constantly overbreathing in an ef fort to keep
their carbon dioxide as low as possible.
_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:

        —
Breathholding hacks, or, as Feinstein would call them, carbon dioxide
therapies, have been around for thousands of years. The ancient Romans
prescribed soaking in thermal baths (which contained high levels of carbon
dioxide that was absorbed through the skin) as a cure for anything from
gout to war wounds. Centuries later, Belle Époque French gathered at
thermal springs at Royat in the French Alps to wade in bubbling waters for
days at a time. “ The study of the chemical composition of the four mineral springs at
Royat will show that we have several powerful agents at our command, and
that much is available for the treatment of many morbid conditions, which
resist the usual pharmaceutical applications we make use of in daily
practice,” wrote Geor ge Henry Brandt, a British doctor who visited in the
late 1870s. Brandt was talking about skin disorders like eczema and
psoriasis, along with respiratory maladies like asthma and bronchitis, all of
which were “ cured almost with certainty” after a few sessions. *
Royat physicians would eventually bottle up carbon dioxide and
administer it as an inhalant. The therapy was so ef fective that it made it
stateside in the early 1900s. A mixture of 5 percent carbon dioxide and the
rest oxygen made popular by Y ale physiologist Y andell Henderson was
used with great success to treat strokes, pneumonia, asthma, and asphyxia
in newborn babies. Fire departments in New Y ork, Chicago, and other
major cities installed carbon dioxide tanks on their trucks. The gas was
credited with saving many lives. All the while, blends of 30 percent carbon dioxide and 70 percent
oxygen became a go-to treatment for anxiety, epilepsy, and evenschizophrenia. W ith a few huf fs of the stuf f, patients who’d spent months or
years in a catatonic state would suddenly come to. They’d open their eyes,
look around, and begin calmly talking with doctors and other patients. “It was a wonderful feeling. It was marvelous. I felt very light and didn’ t
know where I was,” one patient reported. “I knew something had happened
to me and I wasn’ t sure what it was. ”
The patients would stay in this coherent, lucid state for about 30
minutes, until the carbon dioxide wore of f. Then, without warning, they’d
stop mid-sentence and freeze, staring into space and striking statue-like
poses or sometimes collapsing. The patients were sick again. They’d stay
that way until the next hit of carbon dioxide. And then, for reasons nobody quite understands, by the 1950s, a century
of scientific research disappeared. Those with skin disorders turned to pills
and creams; those with asthma managed symptoms with steroids and
bronchodilators. Patients with severe mental disorders were given sedatives. The drugs never cured schizophrenia or other psychoses, but they didn’ t
provoke out-of-body experiences or feelings of euphoria, either. They
numbed patients, and continued to numb them for weeks, months, and years
—as long as they kept taking them. —
“What’ s interesting to me is that nobody disproved it,” says Feinstein of
carbon dioxide therapy. “The data, the science, still holds today. ”
He tells me how he’d stumbled upon some obscure studies by Joseph
W olpe, a renowned psychiatrist who rediscovered carbon dioxide therapy as
a treatment for anxiety and had written an influential paper about it in the
1980s. W olpe’ s patients shared stunning and long-lasting improvements
after just a few huf fs. Donald Klein, another renowned psychiatrist and
expert in panic and anxiety, suggested years later that the gas might help
reset the chemoreceptors in the brain, allowing patients to breathe normally
so they could think normally. Since then, few researchers have studied the
treatments. (Feinstein estimates there are about five researching it now. ) He
just kept wondering if the early researchers were right, if this ancient gas
might be a remedy to modern ailments. “As a psychologist, I think, what are my options, what is the best
treatment for these patients. ” Feinstein says. Pills, he tells me, of fer a false promise and do little good for most
people. Anxiety disorders and depression are the most common mental
illnesses in the United States, and about half of us will suf fer from one or
the other in our lifetime. T o help cope, 13 percent of us over the age of 12
will use antidepressants, most often selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,
also known as SSRIs. These drugs have been lifesavers for millions,
especially those with severe depression and other serious conditions. But
less than half the patients who take them get any benefits. *  “I keep asking
myself,” says Feinstein, “Is this the best we can do. ”
Feinstein had explored various non-pharmaceutical therapies; he’d spent
a decade learning and teaching mindfulness meditation. A wealth of
scientific research shows that meditation can change the structure and
function of critical areas of the brain, help relieve anxieties, and boost focus
and compassion. It can work wonders, but few of us will ever reap these
rewards, because the vast majority of people who try to meditate will give
up and move on. For those with chronic anxieties, the percentages are far
worse. “Mindful meditation—as it is typically practiced—is just no longer
conducive to the new world we live in,” Feinstein explains. Another option, exposure therapy, is a technique that exposes patients
repeatedly to their fears so that they become more accepting of them. It’ s
highly ef fective but takes a while, usually involving many long sessions
over weeks or months. Finding psychologists with that kind of time, and
patients with the necessary resources, can be a challenge. But everyone breathes, and, today, few of us breathe well. Those with
the worst anxieties consistently suf fer from the worst breathing habits. People with anorexia or panic or obsessive-compulsive disorders
consistently have low carbon dioxide levels and a much greater fear of
holding their breath. T o avoid another attack, they breathe far too much and
eventually become hypersensitized to carbon dioxide and panic if they
sense a rise in this gas. They are anxious because they’re overbreathing,
overbreathing because they’re anxious. Feinstein found some inspiring recent studies by Alicia Meuret, the
Southern Methodist University psychologist who helped her patients blunt
asthma attacks by slowing their breathing to increase their carbon dioxide. This technique worked for panic attacks, too. In a randomized controlled trial, she and a group of researchers gave 20
panic suf ferers capnometers, which recorded the amount of carbon dioxidein their breath throughout the day. Meuret crunched the data and found that
panic, like asthma, is usually preceded by an increase in breathing volume
and rate and a decrease in carbon dioxide. T o stop the attack before it
struck, subjects breathed slower and less, increasing their carbon dioxide. This simple and free technique reversed dizziness, shortness of breath, and
feelings of suf focation. It could ef fectively cure a panic attack before the
attack came on. “‘T ake a deep breath’ is not a helpful instruction,” Meuret
wrote. Hold your breath is much better. —
W e leave Feinstein’ s of fice and stroll through a labyrinth of elevators and
staircases until we enter through soundproofed double doors. This is
Feinstein’ s lair. Through the door to the right, he and his team conduct
research on floatation, a therapy that involves lying in a salt-water pool in a
dark, soundless room. Through the door to the left is Feinstein’ s newest
project: a carbon dioxide therapy laboratory. It’ s a tiny windowless box that
looks as if it might have held HV AC equipment at one point. W e squeeze
into the space like clowns in a phone booth. On a folding desk is the usual
array of monitors, computers, wires, EKGs, capnometers, and other stuf f
I’ve grown accustomed to wearing over the past few years. A beat-up
yellow cylinder that looks like a Cold W ar–era Russian missile sits in the
corner. Feinstein tells me it holds 75 pounds of pure carbon dioxide. For the past few months, as part as his NIH research, Feinstein has
brought in patients suf fering with anxiety and panic to this lab and given
them a few hits of carbon dioxide. So far, he tells me, the results have been
promising. Sure, the gas elicited a panic attack in most patients, but this is
all part of the baptism-by-fire process. After that initial bout of discomfort,
many patients report feeling relaxed for hours, even days. I’ve decided to throw my chemoreceptors into the ring. I’ve signed up to
see what a few heavy doses of carbon dioxide would do to my own body
and brain. Feinstein sticks a piece of white foamy material with a metal sensor on
my middle and ring fingers. This device, called a galvanic skin conductance
meter, will measure small amounts of sweat released during states of
sympathetic stress. On my other hand, a pulse oximeter will record my
heart rate and oxygen levels. The mixture I’ll inhale is 35 percent carbon dioxide, and the rest is room
air—about the same percentage of carbon dioxide once used to test
schizophrenics, sans the oxygen. Feinstein administered this same dose on
S. M. , who panicked and hated it. He also tried it out on a few patients early
on, but they too suf fered heavy panic attacks. Some patients were so
freaked out they refused to take another hit, so Feinstein now reduces the
dose to 15 percent—enough to give the chemoreceptors a good workout,
but not enough to keep patients from coming back for more. Since I didn’ t
suf fer from panic attacks or chronic anxiety, not yet at least, he of fered to
crank up my dose to the S.
Carbon dioxide therapy has been around for thousands of years, with the ancient Romans and French using it to treat various conditions, including gout and war wounds.
What is the historical context of carbon dioxide therapy?
Dr. Feinstein is a psychologist who has been studying the effects of carbon dioxide on the body and is now exploring its potential as a treatment for anxiety and panic disorders.
Who is Dr. Feinstein, and what is his research focus?
In ancient cultures, "prana" referred to a vital energy or life force that is connected to the breath. This concept is no longer recognized in modern medicine, which focuses on pharmaceuticals and other treatments.
What is the concept of "prana" in ancient cultures, and how does it relate to modern medicine?
The laboratory is a controlled environment where patients can experience and learn to control their breathing, which is designed to reset the chemoreceptors and help them manage anxiety and panic disorders.
What is the purpose of the carbon dioxide therapy laboratory in Tulsa, Oklahoma?
Modern yoga has deviated from its original purpose of focusing on breathing and has instead become an aerobic exercise, which is not beneficial for everyone, especially those with chronic anxiety.
What is the main issue with modern yoga and its focus on "vinyasa flow"?