At the end of each breath, it felt like my chest had
been plastic-wrapped and my abs had just gone through a brutal workout. “Keep going!” Martin said. The strain of the counting exercise is equivalent to the strain on the
lungs during physical exertion. This was what made the exercise so
ef fective for Stough’ s bedridden patients. The point was to get the
diaphragm accustomed to this wider range so that deep and easy breathing
became unconscious. “Keep moving your lips!” Martin egged me on. “Get
out the last little molecule of air!”
After a few more minutes of counting, silent and otherwise, I stopped
and took a break and felt my diaphragm chugging away like a piston in
slow motion, radiating fresh blood from the center of my body . This is the
feeling of what Stough called “Breathing Coordination,” when the
respiratory and circulatory systems enter a state of equilibrium, when the
amount of air that enters us equals the amount that leaves, and our bodies
are able perform all their essential functions with the least exertion. —
In 1968, Stough left the V A system and his thriving private practice in New
Y ork to train yet another group of students. These people could talk, andthey could walk, and they could run very fast. They were the runners on the
Y ale track and field team, among the best in the nation at the time. When
Stough arrived at the track fieldhouse, the athletes were so excited that they
hung a poster on the bulletin board outside: Dr . Br eath  Is  Her e T oday! Stough had expected these elite athletes to have exemplary breathing
habits. Instead, he found that they suf fered from the same “respiratory
weakness” as everyone else: they got the same colds and flus and lung
infections. Most of them breathed way too often, high in their chests. Sprinters were the worst of f. The short and violent breaths they took during
runs put too much pressure on delicate tissues and bronchial tubes. As a
result, they suf fered from asthma and other respiratory ailments. At the
finish line, they coughed and sometimes vomited and collapsed, wheezing
in pain. “I had observed that in recovering from performance, athletes tended to
adopt the same breathing characteristics as those the emphysema patients
exhibited,” Stough wrote. These runners had been trained to push through
the pain, and they did. They won competitions, but they were harming their
bodies. Stough laid out a table at the Y ale indoor track, sat the runners on it, and
began running his hands up and around their chests in front of a crowd of
onlookers. He warned them to never hold their breath when positioned at
the starting line at the beginning of a race, but to breathe deeply and calmly
and always exhale at the sound of the starter pistol. This way , the first
breath they’d take in would be rich and full and provide them with ener gy
to run faster and longer . After only a few sessions, all the runners reported feeling better and
breathing better . “I never felt so relaxed in my life,” one sprinter said. They
took half the time to recover between races and were soon breaking
personal bests and edging toward world records. On the heels of the Y ale success, Stough moved to South Lake T ahoe to
train Olympic runners preparing for the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico
City . Same therapy , same success. A decathlete went out to the track and
broke his previous record. Another broke his lifetime record. A runner
named Rick Sloan broke his two life records for three events. “Through my work with Dr . Stough, I knew I had to exhale,” said Lee
Evans, an Olympic sprinter . “Y ou know , I exhale, which kept my ener gy up. I didn’ t get tired. . . . But after the game, I found that this was for my life.”Y ou might recognize Evans. He’ s the man in the famous photograph
standing on the center podium at the Olympics awards ceremony , wearing a
Black Panther beret and jutting a fist in the air . He won gold in the 400
meters and another in the 400-meter relay . The rest of the 1968 U.S. men’ s
team under Stough’ s training went on to win a total of 12 Olympic medals,
most gold, and set five world records. It was one of the greatest
performances in an Olympics. The Americans were the only runners to not
use oxygen before or after a race, which was unheard of at the time. They didn’ t need to. Stough had taught them the art of breathing
coordination, and the power of harnessing a full exhalation. —
“He was doing so many things at once,” L ynn Martin says as we moved
from the futon back to the dining room table at the center of her studio
apartment. “The sensitivity of his hands, perfect pitch of his ears, the
natural knack for instruction—all of it.” For the past few minutes, Martin
has been telling me about her time working with Stough, how she’d gone to
see him in 1975 on the recommendation of another dancer and had come
out feeling transformed. She returned weeks later and took a job at the
clinic. Even though Martin would spend more than two decades working
with Stough as one of his closest associates, he never told her his secrets. “He thought it was too dif ficult to put into words,” she said. I could relate. I’d seen a video recording of Stough at the 1992 Aspen
Music Festival—the only existing footage that demonstrates what he did
and how he did it. It opened with a frame that read: An Intr oduction to
Respiratory Science: The Pr eventative Medicine of the T wenty-First
Century . Stough was at the center of a conference room, a massage table in
front of him. An open window looked out over a thicket of pine trees
glowing white in the summer sun. Stough was deeply tanned and dressed in
a black blazer with brass buttons and a pocket kerchief, as if he’d just flown
in on a Concorde from Monte Carlo. He started of f by inviting a tenor named T imothy Jones to lie on the
table and proceeded to jiggle Jones’ s jaw , dig his hands into his waist, and
rock him back and forth. “Y ou see, I have to keep tapping right on the
chest,” said Stough, his yellow polka-dot tie dangling in Jones’ s hair . This
went on for several minutes, until Stough leaned three inches from Jones’ s
face and began to count from one to ten with him in a gibberishy harmony .“Everything’ s loosening very fast!” Stough announced. He wiggled Jones’ s
hips and neck so violently that the singer almost fell of f the table. It was a bizarre spectacle, and the grabbing and pushing and deep
stroking looked at times like borderline molestation. After my own
experience in Martin’ s studio for an hour , babbling numbers and having my
chest poked and ribs squeezed, it became more clear to me why Stough’ s
work never caught on. It didn’ t matter that saxophonist David Sanborn and
asthmatic opera singers, Olympic runners, and hundreds of emphysema
survivors praised his treatments as a lifesaver . Stough wasn’ t a doctor; he
was a self-made pulmonaut, a choir conductor . He was just too far out there. His therapy was just too weird. “Although the process of breathing involves both anatomy and
physiology , neither branch of science has claimed it for thorough
exploration,” wrote Stough. “It was a little-known territory waiting to be
mapped and charted.”
Stough made his map over a half century of constant work. But when he
died, that map was lost. As soon as he left the V A wards, so did his therapy . •       •       •
At the end of my two-hour Breathing Coordination session, I left Martin’ s
apartment and hopped on the train back to Newark Liberty International
Airport. As we rumbled across the marshlands and over the Passaic River , I
searched through the current treatments for the nearly 4 million Americans
now suf fering from emphysema. There were bronchodilators, steroids, and
antibiotics. There was supplemental oxygen and sur gery and something
called pulmonary rehabilitation, which included assistance to quit smoking,
exercise planning, nutrition counseling, and some pursed-lip breathing
techniques. But there was no mention of Stough, or the “second heart” of the
diaphragm, or the importance of a full exhalation. No mention of how
expanding the lungs and breathing properly had ef fectively reversed the
disease or lengthened lives. Emphysema was still listed as an incurable
condition.Five
SLOW
“Could you hand me the oximeter?” Olsson asks from across the dining
room table. It’ s afternoon on the fifth day of the Recovery phase, and for
the past 30 minutes we’ve been testing our pH levels, blood gases, heart
rates, and other vital signs. This is the 45th time we’ve been through this
drill in the past two weeks. Although both Olsson and I feel utterly transformed while nasal
breathing, the monotony of the days is becoming maddening. W e’re eating
the same food at the same time as we did ten days earlier , sweating through
the same stationary bike workouts in the same gym, and having many of the
same conversations. This afternoon we’re discussing Olsson’ s favorite
subject, his obsession for the past decade. W e are, once again, talking about
carbon dioxide. It is hard to admit now , but when I first interviewed Olsson more than a
year ago, he was not a source I entirely trusted. On our Skype calls, he liked
to hammer the importance of slow breathing, and he’d sent me a half-dozen
PowerPoint presentations and reams of scientific studies on how paced
breathing relaxed the body and calmed the mind. This part made perfect
sense. But when he started in on the restorative wonders of a toxic gas, I
began to wonder . “I really think carbon dioxide is more important than
oxygen,” he told me. Olsson claimed that we have 100 times more carbon dioxide in our
bodies than oxygen (which is true), and that most of us need even more of it
(also true). He said it wasn’ t just oxygen but huge quantities of carbon
dioxide that fostered the burst of life during the Cambrian Explosion 500
million years ago. He said that, today , humans can increase this toxic gas inour bodies and sharpen our minds, burn fat, and, in some cases, heal
disease. After a while I began to worry that Olsson was nuts, or at least prone to
gross exaggeration, and that our hours of conversations had been a waste of
time. Carbon dioxide, after all, is a metabolic waste product. It’ s the stuf f that
plumes out of coal plants and rotten fruit. The instructor at a boxing class I
attended used to beseech students to “breathe deep and get all that carbon
dioxide out of your system.” This seemed like good advice. Every other
day , a new headline detailed how Earth was warming because there was too
much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Animals were dying. Carbon
dioxide kills. Olsson kept ar guing the opposite. He insisted that carbon dioxide could
be beneficial, and he warned me that too much oxygen in my body wouldn’ t
help me but hurt me. “Breathing heavy , breathing quickly and as deeply as
you can—I realized this is the worst advice anyone could give you,” Olsson
told me. Big, heavy breaths were bad for us because they depleted our
bodies of, yes, carbon dioxide. Several months of this back-and-forth got me intrigued enough, or
confused enough, or both, that I decided to fly to Sweden, spend a few days
with Olsson, and see his operation in an attempt to learn more about one of
the most misunderstood gases in the universe. •       •       •
I arrived in Stockholm in mid-November and took a train to an industrial
co-working space on the outskirts of town. Through the windows of a
cavernous lobby , the sunlight had a kind of slant to it. Ominous clouds
gathered, and the air was thick with the heavy feeling that precedes a long
winter . Olsson showed up exactly on time, took a seat across from me, and
placed a glass of water on the table. He wore faded jeans, white tennis
shoes, and a pressed white shirt. He had the kind of calm you see in monks,
Amish, and others who spend a lot of time in their inner worlds. When he
spoke, it was always softly , and with that annoying habit that all
Scandinavians seem to have inherited: flawless English, with no umm s orhuh s or pauses. He’d even gotten his whom s down and inserted the oft-
for gotten “not” when he told me how he could care less. “I was going to end up exactly like my father ,” Olsson said, running a
finger along the condensation of the water glass. He told me how his father
had been chronically stressed, how he breathed too much, and how he’d
gotten severe high blood pressure and lung disease and died at 68 with a
breathing tube in his mouth. “I knew that so many other people were going
to stay sick and die of the same thing,” Olsson explained. He wanted to
educate himself so he’d be prepared if something else happened to him or
his family . After the long days he spent running a software distribution company ,
he’d come home and read medical books. He talked to doctors, sur geons,
instructors, and research scientists. Eventually he sold his business, got rid
of his nice cars and big house, got a divorce, and moved into a
condominium. Then he scaled down to a smaller apartment and spent six
years for going any salary , working almost entirely alone, trying to
understand the mysteries of health, medicine, and most specifically
breathing and the role of carbon dioxide in the body . “There were yogi
books about prana and then there were medical books focusing on
pathologies—blood gases and disease and CP AP ,” he said. In short, Olsson found what I’d found, but years earlier: that there was a
gap in our knowledge about the science of breathing and its role in our
bodies. He discovered that we’d done a good job of examining what causes
breathing problems but done little to explore how they first develop and
how we might prevent them. Olsson was in good company . Doctors had been complaining about this
for decades. “The field of respiratory physiology is expanding in all
directions, yet so preoccupied have most physiologists been with lung
volumes, ventilation, circulation, gas exchange, the mechanics of breathing,
the metabolic cost of breathing and the control of breathing that few have
paid much attention to the muscles that actually do the breathing,” one
physician wrote in 1958. Another wrote: “ Until the seventeenth century
most of the great physicians and anatomists were interested in the
respiratory muscles and the mechanics of breathing. Since then these
muscles have been increasingly neglected, lying as they do in a no-man’ s
land between anatomy and physiology .”What many of these doctors found, and what Olsson would discover
much later , was that the best way to prevent many chronic health problems,
improve athletic performance, and extend longevity was to focus on how
we breathed, specifically to balance oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the
body . T o do this, we’d need to learn how to inhale and exhale slowly . •       •       •
How could inhaling smaller amounts of air and having more carbon dioxide
in our bloodstream increase oxygen in our tissues and or gans? How could
doing less give us more? T o understand this contrarian concept, you need to consider the body
parts beyond the nose and mouth. Those structures, after all, are simply the
gateways for the long journey of breath. The purpose of the 25,000 inhales
and exhales we take daily lies deeper inside us. And the farther we follow
this air , the more surprising and strange the journey gets. Y our body , like all human bodies, is essentially a collection of tubes. There are wide tubes, like the throat and sinuses, and very thin tubes like
capillaries. The tubes that make up the tissues of the lungs are very small,
and we’ve got a lot of them. If you lined up all the tubes in the airways of
your body , they’d reach from New Y ork City to Key W est— more than
1,500 miles. Each breath you take must first travel down the throat, past a crossroads
called the tracheal carina, which splits it into the right and left lungs. As it
keeps going, that breath gets pushed into smaller tubes called the
bronchioles until it dead-ends at 500 million little bulbs called the alveoli. What happens next is complicated and confusing. An analogy may help. Let’ s say you’re about to take a river cruise. Y ou’re in a waiting room at
the dock when a ship approaches. Y ou pass through security , board the ship,
and head of f. This is similar to the path oxygen molecules take once they
reach the alveoli. Each of these little “docking stations” is surrounded by a
river of plasma filled with red blood cells. As these cells pass by , oxygen
molecules will slip through the membranes of the alveoli and lodge
themselves inside one. The cellular cruise ship is filled with “guest rooms.” In your blood cells,
those rooms are the protein called hemoglobin. Oxygen takes a seat inside ahemoglobin; then the red blood cells journey upstream, deeper into the
body . As blood passes through tissues and muscles, oxygen will disembark,
providing fuel to hungry cells. As oxygen of floads, other passengers,
namely carbon dioxide—the “waste product” of metabolism—will pile
aboard, and the cruise ship will begin a return journey back to the lungs. This exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide changes the appearance of
blood. The blood cells in the veins that carry more carbon dioxide will
appear blue; arterial blood, still filled with oxygen, will appear bright red. It’ s these gases that give veins and arteries their distinctive colors. Eventually , the cruise ship will make its round through the body and
back to port, back to the lungs, where carbon dioxide will exit the body
through the alveoli, up the throat, and out the mouth and nose in an exhale. More oxygen boards in the next breath and the process starts again. Every healthy cell in the body is fueled by oxygen, and this is how it’ s
delivered. The entire cruise takes about a minute, and the overall numbers
are staggering. Inside each of our 25 trillion red blood cells are 270 million
hemoglobin, each of which has room for four oxygen molecules. That’ s a
billion molecules of oxygen  boarding and disembarking within each red
blood cell cruise ship. There’ s nothing controversial about this process of respiration and the
role of carbon dioxide in gas exchange. It’ s basic biochemistry . What’ s less
acknowledged is the role carbon dioxide plays in weight loss. That carbon
dioxide in every exhale has weight, and we exhale more weight than we
inhale. And the way the body loses weight isn’ t through profusely sweating
or “burning it of f.” W e lose weight through exhaled breath. For every ten pounds of fat lost in our bodies, eight and a half pounds of
it comes out through the lungs; most of it is carbon dioxide mixed with a bit
of water vapor . The rest is sweated or urinated out. This is a fact that most
doctors, nutritionists, and other medical professionals have historically
gotten wrong. The lungs are the weight-regulating system of the body . “Everyone always talks about oxygen,” Olsson told me during our
interview in Stockholm. “Whether we breathe thirty times or five times a
minute, a healthy body will always have enough oxygen!”
What our bodies really want, what they require to function properly ,
isn’ t faster or deeper breaths. It’ s not more air . What we need is more
carbon dioxide.•       •       •
More than a century ago, a baggy-eyed Danish physiologist named
Christian Bohr discovered this in a laboratory in Copenhagen. By his early
30s, Bohr had earned degrees in medicine and physiology and was working
at the University of Copenhagen. He was fascinated with respiration; he
knew that oxygen was the cellular fuel and that hemoglobin was the
transporter . He knew that when oxygen went into a cell, carbon dioxide
came out. But Bohr didn’ t know why  this exchange took place. Why did some
cells get oxygen more easily than others? What directed billions of
hemoglobin molecules to release oxygen at just the right place at the right
time? How did breathing really work? He began experimenting. Bohr gathered chickens, guinea pigs, grass
snakes, dogs, and horses, and measured how much oxygen the animals
consumed and how much carbon dioxide they produced. Then he drew
blood and exposed it to dif ferent mixtures of these gases. Blood with the
most carbon dioxide in it (more acidic) loosened oxygen from hemoglobin. In some ways, carbon dioxide worked as a kind of divorce lawyer , a go-
between to separate oxygen from its ties so it could be free to land another
mate. This discovery explained why certain muscles used during exercise
received more oxygen than lesser -used muscles. They were producing more
carbon dioxide, which attracted more oxygen. It was supply on demand, at a
molecular level. Carbon dioxide also had a profound dilating ef fect on
blood vessels, opening these pathways so they could carry more oxygen-
rich blood to hungry cells. Breathing less allowed animals to produce more
ener gy , more ef ficiently . Meanwhile, heavy and panicked breaths would pur ge carbon dioxide. Just a few moments of heavy breathing above metabolic needs could cause
reduced blood flow to muscles, tissues, and or gans. W e’d feel light-headed,
cramp up, get a headache, or even black out. If these tissues were denied
consistent blood flow for long enough, they’d break down. —
In 1904, Bohr published a paper called “Concerning a Biologically
Important Relationship—The Influence of the Carbon Dioxide Content ofBlood on Its Oxygen Binding.” It was a sensation among scientists and
inspired a flurry of new research into this long-misunderstood gas. Soon
after , Y andell Henderson, the director of the Laboratory of Applied
Physiology at Y ale, began his own set of experiments. Henderson too had
spent the last several years studying metabolism, and, like Bohr , he was
convinced that carbon dioxide was as essential to the body as any vitamin. “ Although clinicians still find it hard to believe, oxygen is in no sense a
stimulant to living creatures,” Henderson would write in the Cyclopedia of
Medicine . “If a fire is supplied with pure oxygen instead of air , it burns with
enormously augmented intensity . But when a man or animal breathes
oxygen, or [air] enriched with oxygen, no more of that gas is consumed, no
more heat is produced and no more carbon dioxide is exhaled than when air
alone is breathed.”
For a healthy body , overbreathing or inhaling pure oxygen would have
no benefit, no ef fect on oxygen delivery to our tissues and or gans, and
could actually create a state of oxygen deficiency , leading to relative
suf focation. In other words, the pure oxygen a quarterback might huf f
between plays, or that a jet-lagged traveler might shell out 50 dollars for at
an airport “oxygen bar ,” are of no benefit. Inhaling the gas might increase
blood oxygen levels one or two percent, but that oxygen will never make it
into our hungry cells. W e’ll simply breathe it back out. *
T o prove his point, over the years Henderson conducted a number of
awful experiments on dogs that are about as dif ficult to read about as
Harvold’ s awful experiments on monkeys. He placed individual dogs on a table in his laboratory and inserted a
tube into their throats, fitting their faces with a rubber mask. At the end of
the tube was a hand bellows. The contraption allowed Henderson to control
how much air each dog took in and how often. He’d connected the tube
from the dogs’ throats to a bottle of ether , which would anesthetize them
during the course of the experiment. A suite of instruments recorded heart
rate, carbon dioxide, oxygen levels, and more. As Henderson pumped the bellows faster and faster , he watched heart
rates of the animals quickly increase from 40 up to 200 or more beats per
minute. The dogs would eventually have so much oxygen flowing through
their arteries, with so little carbon dioxide to of fload it, that muscles,
tissues, and or gans began failing. Some dogs would spasm uncontrollablyor drift into a coma. If Henderson kept pumping more air in, the animals
became so full of oxygen and so deficient in carbon dioxide that they died. Henderson killed dogs with their own breath. W ith the dogs that survived, he would pump the bellows slower and
watch as their heart rates immediately decreased to 40 beats per minute. It
wasn’ t the act of breathing that sped up and slowed the dogs’ heart rates; it
was the amount of carbon dioxide flowing through the bloodstream. Henderson then forced the dogs to breathe just slightly  harder than
normal, just above their metabolic needs, so that their heart rates were
mildly elevated and carbon dioxide levels a little deficient. This was a
condition of mild hyperventilation common in humans. The dogs grew agitated, confused, anxious, and glassy-eyed. The slight
overbreathing was inducing the same confused state that occurred during
altitude sickness or panic attacks. Henderson administered morphine and
other drugs to slow the animals’ heart rates closer to normal. The drugs
worked partly because, as Henderson observed, they helped raise carbon
dioxide levels. But there was another way to restore the animals to health: let them
breathe slowly . Whenever Henderson lowered the respiratory rate in
accordance with the dogs’ normal metabolism—from breathing 200 times a
minute to a normal rate—all the twitching, stupors, and anxiety went away . The animals stretched out and relaxed, their muscles loosened, and a
peacefulness washed over them. “Carbon dioxide is the chief hormone of the entire body; it is the only
one that is produced by every tissue and that probably acts on every or gan,”
Henderson later wrote. “Carbon dioxide is, in fact, a more fundamental
component of living matter than is oxygen.”
•       •       •
I spent three days with Olsson in Stockholm. W e pored over tables and
graphs and talked about Bohr and Henderson and other storied pulmonauts. By the end of my trip, I finally understood how my own view of breathing
had been so limited, and so wrong, for so many years. And I finally
understood how Olsson had become so obsessed with this line of research,
why he’d given up his life as a software tycoon and downgraded to a tiny
apartment, surrounded by shelves of biochemistry textbooks, sleep tape,and carbon dioxide tanks. Why he’d spent so many months recording how
carbon dioxide levels changed inside his body with each new breathing
technique, how it af fected his blood pressure and his ener gy and stress
levels. I understood why only one person showed up for the first conference he
held on breathing, in 2010, and why , after honing his message and building
his research base, he was now something of a Swedish media star who
filled auditoriums, his grinning, perpetually tanned, rom-com face popping
up on newspapers, magazines, and nightly news shows. In these interviews,
he championed the therapeutic ef fects of nasal breathing and beseeched
audiences with the same message of slow breathing. I returned home to San Francisco, and Olsson and I kept in contact. Every few weeks I’d get a new email or a Skype call about some new long-
lost scientific discovery he’d just unearthed in a medical library . He’d
continued his self-experimentation too, always seeking to use his own body
to prove the power of breathing and wonders of the “metabolic waste
product,” carbon dioxide. This is how Olsson ended up, a year after our first meeting, in my living
room in San Francisco with a face mask V elcroed to his head and an EKG
electrode clipped to his ear . •       •       •
“Could you hand me the oximeter , please?” Olsson says again across the
table. W e’ve just finished our afternoon testing, and Olsson is restrapping
himself into the BreathIQ, a prototype of a device that measures carbon
dioxide, ammonia, and other elements in the exhaled breath. He clips a
pulse oximeter on his finger and starts counting down the seconds. Maybe it’ s the carbon dioxide and nitric oxide boost from nasal
breathing, but we’re feeling punchy today . In addition to the five grand we
dropped to take before-and-after X-rays and blood and pulmonary function
tests at Stanford, Olsson and I also managed to amass several thousand
dollars’ worth of equipment at the home lab. W e’ve spent two weeks
running tests and have yet to push the throttle on it all. That’ s changing
today .Olsson wipes a hand on his Abercrombie sweatshirt and scoots over so
that I can see the readouts on the machines. All his vitals are normal: heart
rate hovers around 75, systolic blood pressure clocks in at 126, oxygen
levels at 97 percent. Thr ee, two, one,  he begins breathing. But slowly , very slowly . He inhales and exhales three times slower than
the average American, turning those 18 breaths a minute into six. As he sips
air in through his nose and out through his mouth, I watch as his carbon
dioxide levels rise from 5 percent to 6 percent. They keep rising. A minute
later , Olsson’ s levels are 25 percent higher than they were just a few
minutes ago, taking him from an unhealthy hypocapnic zone to squarely
within a medically normal range. All the while, his blood pressure drops
about five points and heart rate sinks to the mid-60s. What hasn’ t changed is his oxygen. From start to finish, even though
he’ s been breathing at a third of the rate considered normal, his oxygen
hasn’ t wavered: it stayed at 97 percent. W e’d experienced the same confounding measurements during our bike
workouts earlier in the week. The beginning of those workouts, like all
workouts, sucked. W e felt our lungs and respiratory system desperately
trying to meet the needs of our hungry tissues and muscles: the dinner rush
of the body . Normally , I’d open my mouth and huf f and puf f, trying to sate
that nagging need for oxygen. But for the last few days, as I cranked the
pedals harder and faster , I forced myself to breathe softer and slower . This
felt stifling and claustrophobic, like I was starving my body of fuel, until I
checked the pulse oximeter . Once again, no matter how slowly I breathed or
how hard I pedaled, my oxygen levels held steady at 97 percent. It turns out that when breathing at a normal rate, our lungs will absorb
only about a quarter of the available oxygen in the air . The majority of that
oxygen is exhaled back out. By taking longer breaths, we allow our lungs to
soak up more in fewer breaths. “If, with training and patience, you can perform the same exercise
workload with only 14 breaths per minute instead of 47 using conventional
techniques, what reason could there be not to do it?” wrote John Douillard,
the trainer who’d conducted the stationary bike experiments in the 1990s. “When you see yourself running faster every day , with your breath rate
stable . . . you will begin to feel the true meaning of the word fitness .”
I realized then that breathing was like rowing a boat: taking a zillion
short and stilted strokes will get you where you’re going, but they pale incomparison to the ef ficiency and speed of fewer , longer strokes. On the second day of using this slower , nasal breathing approach, I’d
outdistanced my mouthbreathing record by .13 of a mile. The next session, I
pedaled .36 miles farther—a 5 percent increase over mouthbreathing. By
my fifth ride on the stationary bike, I pedaled 7.7 miles, almost a full mile
longer , in the same amount of time, using the same amount of ener gy , than I
had the previous week. This was a significant gain. It wasn’ t quite yet up to
the levels Douillard’ s cyclists reported, but I was edging closer . During that ride, I started playing around with my breathing. I tried to
inhale and exhale slower and slower , from my usual exercising rate of 20
breaths a minute to just six. I immediately felt a sense of air hunger and
claustrophobia. After a minute or so I looked down at the pulse oximeter to
see how much oxygen I was losing, how starved my body had become. But my oxygen hadn’ t decreased with these very slow breaths, as I or
anyone else might expect. My levels r ose . •       •       •
A last word on slow breathing. It goes by another name: prayer . When Buddhist monks chant their most popular mantra, Om Mani
Padme Hum , each spoken phrase lasts six seconds, with six seconds to
inhale before the chant starts again. The traditional chant of Om , the “sacred
sound of the universe” used in Jainism and other traditions, takes six
seconds to sing, with a pause of about six seconds to inhale. The sa ta na ma  chant, one of the best-known techniques in Kundalini
yoga, also takes six seconds to vocalize, followed by six seconds to inhale. Then there were the ancient Hindu hand and tongue poses called mudra s. A
technique called khechari , intended to help boost physical and spiritual
health and overcome disease, involves placing the tongue above the soft
palate so that it’ s pointed toward the nasal cavity . The deep, slow breaths
taken during this khechari  each take six seconds. Japanese, African,
Hawaiian, Native American, Buddhist, T aoist, Christian—these cultures
and religions all had somehow developed the same prayer techniques,
requiring the same breathing patterns. And they all likely benefited from the
same calming ef fect. In 2001, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy gathered two
dozen subjects, covered them with sensors to measure blood flow , heartrate, and nervous system feedback, then had them recite a Buddhist mantra
as well as the original Latin version of the rosary , the Catholic prayer cycle
of the A ve Maria, which is repeated half by a priest and half by the
congregation. They were stunned to find that the average number of breaths
for each cycle was “almost exactly” identical, just a bit quicker than the
pace of the Hindu, T aoist, and Native American prayers: 5.5 breaths a
minute. But what was even more stunning was what breathing like this did to the
subjects. Whenever they followed this slow breathing pattern, blood flow to
the brain increased and the systems in the body entered a state of coherence,
when the functions of heart, circulation, and nervous system are
coordinated to peak ef ficiency . The moment the subjects returned to
spontaneous breathing or talking, their hearts would beat a little more
erratically , and the integration of these systems would slowly fall apart. A
few more slow and relaxed breaths, and it would return again. A decade after the Pavia tests, two renowned professors and doctors in
New Y ork, Patricia Gerbar g and Richard Brown, used the same breathing
pattern on patients with anxiety and depression, minus the praying. Some of
these patients had trouble breathing slowly , so Gerbar g and Brown
recommended they start with an easier rhythm of three-second inhales with
at least the same length exhale. As the patients got more comfortable, they
breathed in and breathed out longer . It turned out that the most ef ficient breathing rhythm occurred when
both the length of respirations and total breaths per minute were locked in
to a spooky symmetry: 5.5-second inhales followed by 5.5-second exhales,
which works out almost exactly to 5.5 breaths a minute. This was the same
pattern of the rosary . The results were profound, even when practiced for just five to ten
minutes a day . “I have seen patients transformed by adopting regular
breathing practices,” said Brown. He and Gerbar g even used this slow
breathing technique to restore the lungs of 9/11 survivors who suf fered
from a chronic and painful cough caused by the debris, a horrendous
condition called ground-glass lungs. There was no known cure for this
ailment, and yet after just two months, patients achieved a significant
improvement by simply learning to practice a few rounds of slow breathing
a day .Gerbar g and Brown would write books and publish several scientific
articles about the restorative power of the slow breathing, which would
become known as “resonant breathing” or Coherent Breathing. The
technique required no real ef fort, time, or thoughtfulness. And we could do
it anywhere, at any time. “It’ s totally private,” wrote Gerbar g. “ Nobody
knows you’re doing it.”
In many ways, this resonant breathing of fered the same benefits as
meditation for people who didn’ t want to meditate. Or yoga for people who
didn’ t like to get of f the couch. It of fered the healing touch of prayer for
people who weren’ t religious. Did it matter if we breathed at a rate of six or five seconds, or were a
half second of f? It did not, as long as the breaths were in the range of 5.5. “W e believe that the rosary may have partly evolved because it
synchronized with the inherent cardiovascular (Mayer) rhythms, and thus
gave a feeling of wellbeing, and perhaps an increased responsiveness to the
religious message,” the Pavia researchers wrote. In other words, the
meditations, A ve Marias, and dozens of other prayers that had been
developed over the past several thousand years weren’ t all baseless. Prayer heals, especially when it’ s practiced at 5.5 breaths a minute.Six
LESS
Few would dispute that we’ve become a culture of overeaters. From around
1850 to 1960, the American mean body mass index (BMI), a measurement
of fat based on height, was between 20 and 22. That’ s about 160 pounds for
a six-foot-tall person. T oday , the average BMI is 29, a 38 percent jump in
50 years. That six-foot person now weighs 214 pounds. Seventy percent of
the U.S. population is considered overweight; one in three are obese. There’ s no doubt we are eating more than we did in the past. Rates of breathing are much more dif ficult to gauge, because there are
fewer studies and the results are inconsistent. Nonetheless, a review of
several available studies of fers a troubling picture. What’ s considered medically normal today is anywhere between a dozen
and 20 breaths a minute, with an average intake of about half a liter per
breath. For those on the high end of respiratory rates, that’ s about twice as
much as it was. *
One thing that every medical or freelance pulmonaut I’ve talked to over
the past several years has agreed on is that, just as we’ve become a culture
of overeaters, we’ve also become a culture of overbreathers. Most of us
breathe too much, and up to a quarter of the modern population suf fers from
more serious chronic overbreathing. The fix is easy: breathe less. But that’ s harder than it sounds. W e’ve
become conditioned to breathe too much, just as we’ve been conditioned to
eat too much. W ith some ef fort and training, however , breathing less can
become an unconscious habit. Indian yogis train themselves to decrease the amount of air they take in
at rest, not increase it. T ibetan Buddhists prescribed step-by-stepinstructions to reduce and calm breathing for aspiring monks. Chinese
doctors two thousand years ago advised 13,500 breaths per day , which
works out to nine and a half breaths per minute. They likely breathed less in
those fewer breaths. In Japan, legend has it that samurai would test a
soldier ’ s readiness by placing a feather beneath his nostrils while he inhaled
and exhaled. If the feather moved, the soldier would be dismissed. T o be clear , breathing less is not the same as breathing slowly . A verage
adult lungs can hold about four to six liters of air . Which means that, even if
we practice slow breathing at 5.5 breaths per minute, we could still be
easily taking in twice the air we need. The key to optimum breathing, and all the health, endurance, and
longevity benefits that come with it, is to practice fewer inhales and exhales
in a smaller volume. T o breathe, but to br eathe less . •       •       •
W ith only four days left in the Stanford experiment, I was reaping the
benefits of slowing my respiratory rate. My blood pressure kept dropping,
my heart rate variability kept rising, and I had more ener gy than I knew
what to do with. All the while, Olsson kept prodding me to reduce my breathing rate
even further . He harped on about the wonders of breathing way less  than
anyone normally should: the respiratory equivalent of fasting. Starving
yourself of air can be injurious if it becomes a regular thing, he warned. Ordinarily , we should breathe as closely in line with our needs as we can. But occasionally willing the body to breathe way less,  he ar gued, has some
potent benefits just as fasting does. Sometimes it can lead to euphoria. —
“It was a better feeling than when I got married, better than when my first
kid was born,” Olsson says. It’ s morning and we’re driving past the ragged gray waves along
Highway 1. I’m at the wheel and Olsson is beside me in the passenger seat,
smiling broadly , reliving the moment five years ago when he saw God. “I ran for an hour or so, six miles I think, and I came home and sat in
my living room chair .” His voice is quivering a little here, he’ s almostlaughing. “And I had this dull headache, that good  headache, and I felt the
most intense peace and unity in the world . . . everything. . . .”
Our destination today is Golden Gate Park, which of fers miles of
uninterrupted jogging tracks beneath the canopies of blue gum eucalyptus,
T asmanian tree ferns, cypress, and redwoods. Because the tracks are dirt,
we won’ t split our heads open and die if we suddenly go unconscious,
which, Olsson warns, is a rare but real side ef fect of the breathing- way-less
thing we’ll be attempting. Olsson swears by this approach. He and his clients have reported
profound improvements in endurance and well-being after a few weeks of
training. However , I’d heard from many others that it could be miserable
and might induce vicious headaches—not “good” ones. It wasn’ t for
dabblers. I turn the car from the freeway on to a one-lane street and park beside
the lot of the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club. A herd of buf falo
behind a chain-link fence stare with bored eyes as Olsson and I slip of f our
jackets, take a few last swigs of water , lock the car , and hit the ground
running. I hate jogging. Unlike with other physical activities—especially water
sports like surfing or swimming—whenever I jog, I’m fully conscious of
the misery and boredom of every second. I’ve never reached that spaced-
out runner ’ s high, even though, years back, I’d put in four -mile runs every
other day . The benefits of jogging were obvious: I always felt great . . . afterward. But doing it was a grind. Olsson wanted to change my mind. He’ s been jogging for decades and
has trained dozens of runners. “The key is to find a rhythm that works for
you,” he tells me as we beeline into the bramble. “Y ou should challenge
yourself, but at the same time don’ t overdo it.”
The trail splits of f and we follow the path less traveled. The sun shines
through skyscraper trees, there’ s musty spearmint wafting through the air
and the satisfying crunch of footfalls on crispy leaves. It’ s nice. “What I want you to do is, as you warm up, start extending your
exhales,” he says. He prepped me earlier for this, so I know what’ s coming. Each breath we draw in should take about three seconds, and each
breath out should take four . W e’ll then continue the same short inhales
while lengthening the exhales to a five, six, and seven count as the run
progresses.Slower , longer exhales, of course, mean higher carbon dioxide levels. W ith that bonus carbon dioxide, we gain a higher aerobic endurance. This
measurement of highest oxygen consumption, called VO2  max, is the best
gauge of cardiorespiratory fitness. T raining the body to breathe less actually
increases VO2  max, which can not only boost athletic stamina but also help
us live longer and healthier lives. •       •       •
The godfather of less-is-more was a pulmonaut born in 1923 on a farm
outside Kiev , in what is now Ukraine. His name was Konstantin Pavlovich
Buteyko, and he spent his youth examining the world around him. Anything, really . Plants, insects, toys, cars. He came to view the world as a
mechanism, and everything within it as a collection of parts locking
together to form a greater whole. By the time he was a teenager , Buteyko
had developed into a brilliant mechanic and would later spend four years on
the front lines of W orld W ar II fixing cars, tanks, and artillery for the Soviet
army . “When the W ar ended, I decided to start researching the most complex
machine, the Man,” he said. “I thought if I learnt him, I’d be able to
diagnose his diseases as easily as I had diagnosed machine disorders.”
Buteyko went on to attend the First Moscow Institute of Medicine, the
most prestigious medical school in the Soviet Union, graduating cum laude
in 1952. During his residency rounds, he noticed that patients in the worst
health all seemed to breathe far too much. The more they breathed, the
worse of f they were, especially those with hypertension. Buteyko himself suf fered from severe high blood pressure, along with
the debilitating headaches and stomach and heart pain that often
accompanied the condition. He’d been put on prescription drugs to no
ef fect. When he was 29, his systolic blood pressure had shot to 212, a
dangerously high number . Doctors gave him a year to live. “One can avoid cancer by cutting it out,” Buteyko would later say . “But
you can’ t avoid hypertension.” The best he could do for his patients, and
himself, was to try to numb the symptoms. As the story goes, one night in October , Buteyko was standing alone in a
hospital room, looking out from a window into a black autumn sky . He
turned his focus to his reflection in the glass—a gaunt and haggard facedrawing heavy breaths through an open mouth. His eyes roamed down to
the white robe covering his chest, to his shoulders flexing and lifting with
each labored inhale and exhale. This was the same respiratory rate he’d
seen in terminally ill patients. Buteyko wasn’ t exercising, and yet he was
breathing as if he’d just finished a workout. He tried an experiment. He started breathing less, to relax his chest and
stomach and sip air through his nose. A few minutes later , the throbbing
pain in his head, stomach, and heart disappeared. Buteyko returned to the
heavy breathing he’d been doing minutes earlier . W ithin only five inhales,
the pain returned. What if overbr eathing wasn’ t the  r esult  of hypertension and headaches
but the cause? Buteyko wondered. Heart disease, ulcers, and chronic
inflammation were all linked to disturbances in circulation, blood pH, and
metabolism. How we breathe af fects all those functions. Breathing just 20
percent, or even 10 percent more than the body’ s needs could overwork our
systems. Eventually , they’d weaken and falter . W as breathing too much
making people sick, and keeping them that way? Buteyko took a walk. In the asthma ward, he found a man stooped over ,
fighting suf focation, gasping for air . Buteyko approached and showed him
the technique he’d been using on himself. After a few minutes, the patient
calmed down. He inhaled a careful and clear breath through his nose and
then calmly exhaled. Suddenly , his face flushed with color . The asthma
attack was over . •       •       •
Back in Golden Gate Park, Olsson and I are jogging deeper into the foot
trail. The bucolic scene of dappled sunlight and A vatar  trees has morphed
into a more urban mess of wheel-less shopping carts and suspicious mounds
of toilet paper . W e realize the path less traveled may be less traveled for a
reason. A quick left, and we’re on our way back to the coastal route. W e jog past an old hippie sitting on a tree stump playing the Jeopar dy! theme song on a trumpet with one hand and reading a dog-eared paperback
with the other . In front of him, an impeccably dressed man goads an old dog
into a beat-up Mercedes 300SD, and a woman with waist-length dreadlocks
and Mork-from-Ork suspenders whizzes by on an electric scooter . It’ s a
quintessentially San Francisco scene. Olsson and I fit right in.W e’ve been practicing an extreme version of the techniques Buteyko
used on himself and in the asthma ward: limiting our inhales while
extending exhales far past the point of what feels comfortable, or even safe. W e’re sweating and red-faced and I can feel veins bulging in my neck. I’m
not exactly out of breath, but I don’ t feel satisfied, either . Even when I sip a
little more air , I feel like I’m being mildly strangled. The point of this exercise isn’ t to inflict unnecessary pain. It’ s to get the
body comfortable with higher levels of carbon dioxide, so that we’ll
unconsciously breathe less during our resting hours and the next time we
work out. So that we’ll release more oxygen, increase our endurance, and
better support all the functions in our bodies. “T ry to extend the exhales even more,” Olsson says as he takes tiny nips
of air through his nose. “Breathe out twice as long for each inhale, three
times,” he chides me. For a moment, I feel like I’m going to puke. “Y es!” he says. “Even slower , even less!”
•       •       •
By the late 1950s, Buteyko left the hospitals of Moscow and headed to
Akademgorodok (“Academic City”), a cluster of 35 concrete-block research
facilities located in central Siberia. The distant location was by design. For
the past few years, the Soviet government had sent tens of thousands of the
finest space engineers, chemists, physicists, and others to live in secrecy
among the laboratories. Their job was to develop cutting-edge technologies
aimed at ensuring the Soviet Union’ s dominance. In many ways it was a
Soviet Silicon V alley , but without the fleece vests, kombucha, sunshine,
T eslas, and civil liberties. Buteyko had moved there at the request of the USSR Academy of
Medical Sciences, the Soviet equivalent to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. After his epiphany in the asthma ward, he’d pored over
research papers and analyzed hundreds of patients. He’d become convinced
that breathing too much was the culprit behind several chronic diseases. Like Bohr and Henderson, Buteyko was fascinated with carbon dioxide,
and he too believed that increasing this gas by breathing less could not only
keep us fit and healthy . It could heal us as well. At Akademgorodok he set out to conduct the most exhaustive breathing
experiments that science had ever attempted. He collected a staf f of morethan 200 researchers and assistants in a sweeping city hospital called the
Laboratory of Functional Diagnostics. Subjects would come in and lie on a
gurney , sandwiched between stacks of machines. Phlebotomists would plug
catheters into their veins while other researchers stuck hoses into their
throats and electrodes around the heart and head. As the subjects breathed
in and out, a primitive computer recorded 100,000 bits of data per hour . The sick and healthy , young and old—more than a thousand of them
came to Buteyko’ s lab. The patients with asthma, hypertension, and other
ailments consistently breathed the same: too much. They often inhaled and
exhaled through the mouth, packing in 15 liters or more of air per minute. Some breathed so loudly they could be heard several feet away . The
readouts showed that they had plenty of oxygen in their blood, but much
less carbon dioxide, about 4 percent. Resting heart rates were up to 90 beats
per minute. The healthiest patients breathed alike, too: less. They’d inhale and
exhale about ten times a minute, taking in a total of about five to six liters
of air . Their resting pulses ranged from around 48 to 55, and they had 6.5 to
7.5 percent carbon dioxide levels in their exhaled breath. Buteyko developed a protocol based on the breathing habits of these
healthiest patients, which he’d later call V oluntary Elimination of Deep
Breathing. The techniques were many and they varied, but the purpose of
each was to train patients to always breathe as closely as possible to their
metabolic needs, which almost always meant taking in less air . How many
breaths we took per minute was less important to Buteyko, as long as we
were breathing no more than about six liters per minute at rest. W ithin a few sessions of practicing these techniques, patients reported
tingling and heat in their hands and toes. Their heart rates would slow and
stabilize. The hypertension and migraines that had debilitated so many of
them would begin to disappear . Those already in good health felt even
better . Athletes claimed big gains in performance. —
Around this time, a few thousand miles east, in the industrial factory town
of Zlín, Czechoslovakia, a gangly , five-foot-eight-inch runner named Emil
Zátopek was experimenting with his own breath-restriction techniques. Zátopek never wanted to become a runner . When the management at the
shoe factory where he was working elected him for a local race, he tried torefuse. Zátopek told them he was unfit, that he had no interest, that he’d
never run in a competition. But he competed anyway and came in second
out of 100 contestants. Zátopek saw a brighter future for himself in running,
and began to take the sport more seriously . Four years later he broke the
Czech national records for the 2,000, 3,000, and 5,000 meters. Zátopek developed his own training methods to give himself an edge. He’d run as fast as he could holding his breath, take a few huf fs and puf fs
and then do it all again. It was an extreme version of Buteyko’ s methods,
but Zátopek didn’ t call it V oluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing. Nobody
did. It would become known as hypoventilation training. Hypo , which
comes from the Greek for “under” (as in hypodermic needle), is the
opposite of hyper , meaning “over .” The concept of hypoventilation training
was to breathe less. Over the years, Zátopek’ s approach was widely derided and mocked, but
he ignored the critics. At the 1952 Olympics, he won gold in the 5,000 and
10,000 meters. On the heels of his success, he decided to compete in the
marathon, an event he had neither trained for nor run in his life. He won
gold. Zátopek would claim 18 world records, four Olympic golds and a
silver over his career . He would later be named the “Greatest Runner of All
T ime” by Runner ’ s W orld  magazine. “He does everything wrong but win,”
said Larry Snyder , a track coach at Ohio State at the time. —
Hypoventilation training didn’ t exactly take of f after Zátopek. His
anguished face, teeth grinding and eyes wincing like a Matthias Grünewald
Jesus , became his trademark look as he crossed the finish line, often in first
place. It all seemed miserable, because it was, and most athletes steered
clear . Then, decades later , in the 1970s, a hard-assed U.S. swim coach named
James Counsilman rediscovered it. Counsilman was notorious for his “ hurt,
pain, and agony”–based training techniques, and hypoventilation fit right in. Competitive swimmers usually take two or three strokes before they flip
their heads to the side and inhale. Counsilman trained his team to hold their
breath for as many as nine strokes. He believed that, over time, the
swimmers would utilize oxygen more ef ficiently and swim faster . In a
sense, it was Buteyko’ s V oluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing and
Zátopek hypoventilation—underwater . Counsilman used it to train the U.S.Men’ s Swimming team for the Montreal Olympics. They won 13 gold
medals, 14 silver , and 7 bronze, and they set world records in 11 events. It
was the greatest performance by a U.S. Olympic swim team in history . Hypoventilation training fell back into obscurity after several studies in
the 1980s and 1990s ar gued that it had little to no impact on performance
and endurance. Whatever these athletes were gaining, the researchers
reported, must have been based on a strong placebo ef fect. In the early 2000s, Dr . Xavier W oorons, a French physiologist at Paris
13 University , found a flaw in these studies. The scientists critical of the
technique had measured it all wrong. They’d been looking at athletes
holding their breath with full lungs, and all that extra air in the lungs made
it dif ficult for the athletes to enter into a deep state of hypoventilation. W oorons repeated the tests, but this time subjects practiced the half-full
technique, which is how Buteyko trained his patients, and likely how
Counsilman trained his swimmers. Breathing less of fered huge benefits. If
athletes kept at it for several weeks, their muscles adapted to tolerate more
lactate accumulation, which allowed their bodies to pull more ener gy during
states of heavy anaerobic stress, and, as a result, train harder and longer . Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood
cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more ener gy with
each breath. Breathing way less  delivered the benefits of high-altitude
training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere. Over the years, this style of breath restriction has been given many
names—hypoventilation, hypoxic training, Buteyko technique, and the
pointlessly technical “normobaric hypoxia training.” The outcomes were
the same: a profound boost in performance. *  Not just for elite athletes, but
for everyone. Just a few weeks of the training significantly increased endurance,
reduced more “trunk fat,” improved cardiovascular function, and boosted
muscle mass compared to normal-breathing exercise. This list goes on. The takeaway is that hypoventilation works. It helps train the body to do
more with less. But that doesn’ t mean it’ s pleasant. •       •       •
Olsson and I emer ge from the shady tranquility of Golden Gate Park,
stopping to face the wind-ripped Pacific Ocean. W e’ve just jogged a fewmiles, inhaling fast and exhaling very long breaths to a count of about seven
or higher , trying to keep our lungs roughly half full. I want to believe that
this training may be helping me as it helped Zátopek, Counsilman’ s
swimmers, W ooron’ s runners, and everyone else, but the past several
minutes have been a challenge. A half hour into all this I’m beginning to
resent my life choices. I can’ t figure out if it’ s bad luck or shortsightedness
that has led me to repeatedly pursue topics of research like freediving,
V oluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing, and hypoventilation therapy that
require me to hold my breath and torture my lungs for hours a day . “The key is to find a rhythm that works for you,” Olsson keeps saying. The rhythm is definitely not  working. I return to my more manageable
practice, inhaling for two steps and exhaling for five, a pattern competitive
cyclists use. This isn’ t exactly comfortable, but it’ s tolerable. W e run across the cracked asphalt of a beachside parking lot, passing a
few rusting W innebagos and hopping over condom wrappers and smashed
cans of malt liquor before heading back across the highway . Minutes later
we’re back in the quietude of the park, treading a dirt path beneath an
understory of trees along a black pond filled with quacking ducks. That’ s when it starts to hit me: an intense heat at the back of my neck
and pixelated vision. I’m still jogging, exhaling long breaths, but it feels as
though I’m simultaneously jumping headfirst into warm, thick liquid. I run
a little harder , breathe a little less, and feel heat, heavy like hot syrup,
seeping down into my fingertips, toes, arms, and legs. It feels great. The
warmth moves higher through my face and wraps around the crown of my
head. This must be the good headache  Olsson was talking about, of carbon
dioxide increasing and oxygen dislodging from hemoglobin to those hungry
cells, of the vessels in my brain and body expanding, so engor ged with
fresh blood that they’re sending dull pain signals to my nervous system. Just when it feels like I’m about to reach some kind of existential
crescendo, the little foot trail widens. The bored buf falo appear , rustling
behind a chain-link fence. A dozen yards away is the lot of the Golden Gate
Angling and Casting Club. My car is beside it, and we’re done. —
There are no huge life epiphanies as we drive home. I can’ t say I’m feeling
euphoric, but that’ s OK. My little jog proved there’ s much to gain from thisless  approach. At the same time, such extreme training would be useful
only for those willing to endure hours of red-faced, sweaty suf fering. Healthy breathing shouldn’ t be so much work. Buteyko knew this, and
he rarely , if ever , prescribed such brutal methods to his patients. After all,
he wasn’ t interested in coaching elite athletes to win gold medals. He
wanted to save lives. He wanted to teach techniques of breathing less that
could be practiced by everyone, regardless of their state of health, age, or
level of fitness. Over his career , Buteyko would be censured by medical critics; he’d be
physically attacked and, at one point, have his laboratory torn up. But he
pressed on. By the 1980s, he had published more than 50 scientific papers
and the Soviet Ministry of Health had recognized his techniques as
ef fective. Some 200,000 people in Russia alone had learned his methods. According to several sources, Buteyko was once invited to England to meet
with Prince Charles, who was suf fering from breathing dif ficulties brought
on by aller gies. Buteyko helped the prince, and he helped heal upward of 80
percent of his patients suf fering from hypertension, arthritis, and other
ailments. V oluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing was especially ef fective in
treating respiratory diseases. It seemed to work like a miracle for asthma. •       •       •
In the decades since Buteyko first started training patients to breathe less,
asthma has become a global epidemic. Nearly 25 million Americans now
suf fer from it—that’ s about 8 percent of the population, and a fourfold
increase since 1980. Asthma is the leading cause of emer gency room visits,
hospitalizations, and missed school days for children. It is considered a
controllable but incurable disease. Asthma is an immune system sensitivity that provokes constriction and
spasms in the airways. Pollutants, dust, viral infections, cold air , and more
can all lead to attacks. But asthma can be brought on by overbreathing,
which is why it’ s so common during physical exertion, a condition called
exercise-induced asthma that af fects around 15 percent of the population
and up to 40 percent of athletes. At rest or during exercise, asthmatics as a
whole tend to breathe more—sometimes much more—than those without
asthma. Once an attack starts, things go from bad to worse. Air gets trappedin the lungs and passageways constrict, which makes it harder to push air
out and back in. More breathing but more feelings of breathlessness ensue,
more constriction, more panic, and more stress. The worldwide annual market for asthma therapies is $20 billion, and
drugs often work so well that they can feel like a virtual cure. But drugs, in
particular oral steroids, can have horrendous side ef fects after several years,
including deteriorating lung function, worsened asthma symptoms,
blindness, and increased risk of death. Millions of asthma suf ferers already
know this, and are experiencing these problems for themselves. Many of
them have trained themselves to breathe less and reported dramatic
improvement. For several months before the Stanford experiment, I interviewed
Buteyko practitioners and collected their stories. One was David W iebe, a 58-year -old luthier of cellos and violins from
W oodstock, New Y ork, whom I’d read about in The New Y ork T ime s. W iebe
had suf fered from severe asthma since he was ten. He used bronchodilators
up to 20 times a day , along with steroids, in an ef fort to keep his symptoms
at bay . His body became tolerant of drugs, which meant that W iebe had to
increase the dose. After decades of constant use, the steroids weakened his
eyesight, a condition called macular degeneration. If he kept taking them,
W iebe would go blind; if he stopped taking them, he wouldn’ t be able to
breathe and might die of an asthma attack. W ithin three months of learning how to breathe less, W iebe was using
no more than one inhaler puf f a day , and he’d cut out steroids entirely . He
claimed to feel few asthma symptoms at all. For the first time in five
decades he could breathe easy . Even W iebe’ s pulmonologist was impressed,
confirming that there was a marked improvement in W iebe’ s asthma and
overall health. There were others. Like the chief information of ficer at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who had also suf fered from debilitating
asthma his whole adult life, and who, like W iebe, reported few symptoms of
asthma within weeks of retraining himself to breathe less. “I’m a new man,”
he wrote. There was the 70-year -old woman I’d spent an hour with at a
Whole Foods café, who had experienced crippling asthma the past six
decades and could hardly walk a few blocks without having an attack. After
a few months of breathing less she was hiking for hours a day and on her
way to travel in Mexico. “This is nothing short of a miracle,” she told me.There was the mom from Kentucky who endured such horrendous
breathing problems that she contemplated suicide. There were also athletes
like Olympians Ramon Andersson, Matthew Dunn, and Sanya Richards-
Ross, who had used breathing less methods. All of them claimed to have
gained a boost in performance and blunted the symptoms of respiratory
problems, simply by decreasing the volume of air in their lungs and
increasing the carbon dioxide in their bodies. The most convincing scientific validation of breathing less for asthma
came by way of Dr .
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Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        At the end of each breath, it felt like my chest had
been plastic-wrapped and my abs had just gone through a brutal workout. “Keep going. ” Martin said. The strain of the counting exercise is equivalent to the strain on the
lungs during physical exertion. This was what made the exercise so
ef fective for Stough’ s bedridden patients. The point was to get the
diaphragm accustomed to this wider range so that deep and easy breathing
became unconscious. “Keep moving your lips. ” Martin egged me on. “Get
out the last little molecule of air. ”
After a few more minutes of counting, silent and otherwise, I stopped
and took a break and felt my diaphragm chugging away like a piston in
slow motion, radiating fresh blood from the center of my body. This is the
feeling of what Stough called “Breathing Coordination,” when the
respiratory and circulatory systems enter a state of equilibrium, when the
amount of air that enters us equals the amount that leaves, and our bodies
are able perform all their essential functions with the least exertion. —
In 1968, Stough left the V A system and his thriving private practice in New
Y ork to train yet another group of students. These people could talk, andthey could walk, and they could run very fast. They were the runners on the
Y ale track and field team, among the best in the nation at the time. When
Stough arrived at the track fieldhouse, the athletes were so excited that they
hung a poster on the bulletin board outside: Dr. Br eath  Is  Her e T oday. Stough had expected these elite athletes to have exemplary breathing
habits. Instead, he found that they suf fered from the same “respiratory
weakness” as everyone else: they got the same colds and flus and lung
infections. Most of them breathed way too often, high in their chests. Sprinters were the worst of f. The short and violent breaths they took during
runs put too much pressure on delicate tissues and bronchial tubes. As a
result, they suf fered from asthma and other respiratory ailments. At the
finish line, they coughed and sometimes vomited and collapsed, wheezing
in pain. “I had observed that in recovering from performance, athletes tended to
adopt the same breathing characteristics as those the emphysema patients
exhibited,” Stough wrote. These runners had been trained to push through
the pain, and they did. They won competitions, but they were harming their
bodies. Stough laid out a table at the Y ale indoor track, sat the runners on it, and
began running his hands up and around their chests in front of a crowd of
onlookers. He warned them to never hold their breath when positioned at
the starting line at the beginning of a race, but to breathe deeply and calmly
and always exhale at the sound of the starter pistol. This way, the first
breath they’d take in would be rich and full and provide them with ener gy
to run faster and longer. After only a few sessions, all the runners reported feeling better and
breathing better. “I never felt so relaxed in my life,” one sprinter said. They
took half the time to recover between races and were soon breaking
personal bests and edging toward world records. On the heels of the Y ale success, Stough moved to South Lake T ahoe to
train Olympic runners preparing for the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico
City. Same therapy, same success. A decathlete went out to the track and
broke his previous record. Another broke his lifetime record. A runner
named Rick Sloan broke his two life records for three events. “Through my work with Dr. Stough, I knew I had to exhale,” said Lee
Evans, an Olympic sprinter. “Y ou know, I exhale, which kept my ener gy up. I didn’ t get tired. But after the game, I found that this was for my life. ”Y ou might recognize Evans. He’ s the man in the famous photograph
standing on the center podium at the Olympics awards ceremony, wearing a
Black Panther beret and jutting a fist in the air. He won gold in the 400
meters and another in the 400-meter relay. The rest of the 1968 U. S. men’ s
team under Stough’ s training went on to win a total of 12 Olympic medals,
most gold, and set five world records. It was one of the greatest
performances in an Olympics. The Americans were the only runners to not
use oxygen before or after a race, which was unheard of at the time. They didn’ t need to. Stough had taught them the art of breathing
coordination, and the power of harnessing a full exhalation. —
“He was doing so many things at once,” L ynn Martin says as we moved
from the futon back to the dining room table at the center of her studio
apartment. “The sensitivity of his hands, perfect pitch of his ears, the
natural knack for instruction—all of it. ” For the past few minutes, Martin
has been telling me about her time working with Stough, how she’d gone to
see him in 1975 on the recommendation of another dancer and had come
out feeling transformed. She returned weeks later and took a job at the
clinic. Even though Martin would spend more than two decades working
with Stough as one of his closest associates, he never told her his secrets. “He thought it was too dif ficult to put into words,” she said. I could relate. I’d seen a video recording of Stough at the 1992 Aspen
Music Festival—the only existing footage that demonstrates what he did
and how he did it. It opened with a frame that read: An Intr oduction to
Respiratory Science: The Pr eventative Medicine of the T wenty-First
Century. Stough was at the center of a conference room, a massage table in
front of him. An open window looked out over a thicket of pine trees
glowing white in the summer sun. Stough was deeply tanned and dressed in
a black blazer with brass buttons and a pocket kerchief, as if he’d just flown
in on a Concorde from Monte Carlo. He started of f by inviting a tenor named T imothy Jones to lie on the
table and proceeded to jiggle Jones’ s jaw, dig his hands into his waist, and
rock him back and forth. “Y ou see, I have to keep tapping right on the
chest,” said Stough, his yellow polka-dot tie dangling in Jones’ s hair. This
went on for several minutes, until Stough leaned three inches from Jones’ s
face and began to count from one to ten with him in a gibberishy harmony. “Everything’ s loosening very fast. ” Stough announced. He wiggled Jones’ s
hips and neck so violently that the singer almost fell of f the table. It was a bizarre spectacle, and the grabbing and pushing and deep
stroking looked at times like borderline molestation. After my own
experience in Martin’ s studio for an hour, babbling numbers and having my
chest poked and ribs squeezed, it became more clear to me why Stough’ s
work never caught on. It didn’ t matter that saxophonist David Sanborn and
asthmatic opera singers, Olympic runners, and hundreds of emphysema
survivors praised his treatments as a lifesaver. Stough wasn’ t a doctor; he
was a self-made pulmonaut, a choir conductor. He was just too far out there. His therapy was just too weird. “Although the process of breathing involves both anatomy and
physiology, neither branch of science has claimed it for thorough
exploration,” wrote Stough. “It was a little-known territory waiting to be
mapped and charted. ”
Stough made his map over a half century of constant work. But when he
died, that map was lost. As soon as he left the V A wards, so did his therapy. •       •       •
At the end of my two-hour Breathing Coordination session, I left Martin’ s
apartment and hopped on the train back to Newark Liberty International
Airport. As we rumbled across the marshlands and over the Passaic River, I
searched through the current treatments for the nearly 4 million Americans
now suf fering from emphysema. There were bronchodilators, steroids, and
antibiotics. There was supplemental oxygen and sur gery and something
called pulmonary rehabilitation, which included assistance to quit smoking,
exercise planning, nutrition counseling, and some pursed-lip breathing
techniques. But there was no mention of Stough, or the “second heart” of the
diaphragm, or the importance of a full exhalation. No mention of how
expanding the lungs and breathing properly had ef fectively reversed the
disease or lengthened lives. Emphysema was still listed as an incurable
condition. Five
SLOW
“Could you hand me the oximeter. ” Olsson asks from across the dining
room table. It’ s afternoon on the fifth day of the Recovery phase, and for
the past 30 minutes we’ve been testing our pH levels, blood gases, heart
rates, and other vital signs. This is the 45th time we’ve been through this
drill in the past two weeks. Although both Olsson and I feel utterly transformed while nasal
breathing, the monotony of the days is becoming maddening. W e’re eating
the same food at the same time as we did ten days earlier, sweating through
the same stationary bike workouts in the same gym, and having many of the
same conversations. This afternoon we’re discussing Olsson’ s favorite
subject, his obsession for the past decade. W e are, once again, talking about
carbon dioxide. It is hard to admit now, but when I first interviewed Olsson more than a
year ago, he was not a source I entirely trusted. On our Skype calls, he liked
to hammer the importance of slow breathing, and he’d sent me a half-dozen
PowerPoint presentations and reams of scientific studies on how paced
breathing relaxed the body and calmed the mind. This part made perfect
sense. But when he started in on the restorative wonders of a toxic gas, I
began to wonder. “I really think carbon dioxide is more important than
oxygen,” he told me. Olsson claimed that we have 100 times more carbon dioxide in our
bodies than oxygen (which is true), and that most of us need even more of it
(also true). He said it wasn’ t just oxygen but huge quantities of carbon
dioxide that fostered the burst of life during the Cambrian Explosion 500
million years ago. He said that, today, humans can increase this toxic gas inour bodies and sharpen our minds, burn fat, and, in some cases, heal
disease. After a while I began to worry that Olsson was nuts, or at least prone to
gross exaggeration, and that our hours of conversations had been a waste of
time. Carbon dioxide, after all, is a metabolic waste product. It’ s the stuf f that
plumes out of coal plants and rotten fruit. The instructor at a boxing class I
attended used to beseech students to “breathe deep and get all that carbon
dioxide out of your system. ” This seemed like good advice. Every other
day, a new headline detailed how Earth was warming because there was too
much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Animals were dying. Carbon
dioxide kills. Olsson kept ar guing the opposite. He insisted that carbon dioxide could
be beneficial, and he warned me that too much oxygen in my body wouldn’ t
help me but hurt me. “Breathing heavy, breathing quickly and as deeply as
you can—I realized this is the worst advice anyone could give you,” Olsson
told me. Big, heavy breaths were bad for us because they depleted our
bodies of, yes, carbon dioxide. Several months of this back-and-forth got me intrigued enough, or
confused enough, or both, that I decided to fly to Sweden, spend a few days
with Olsson, and see his operation in an attempt to learn more about one of
the most misunderstood gases in the universe. •       •       •
I arrived in Stockholm in mid-November and took a train to an industrial
co-working space on the outskirts of town. Through the windows of a
cavernous lobby, the sunlight had a kind of slant to it. Ominous clouds
gathered, and the air was thick with the heavy feeling that precedes a long
winter. Olsson showed up exactly on time, took a seat across from me, and
placed a glass of water on the table. He wore faded jeans, white tennis
shoes, and a pressed white shirt. He had the kind of calm you see in monks,
Amish, and others who spend a lot of time in their inner worlds. When he
spoke, it was always softly, and with that annoying habit that all
Scandinavians seem to have inherited: flawless English, with no umm s orhuh s or pauses. He’d even gotten his whom s down and inserted the oft-
for gotten “not” when he told me how he could care less. “I was going to end up exactly like my father,” Olsson said, running a
finger along the condensation of the water glass. He told me how his father
had been chronically stressed, how he breathed too much, and how he’d
gotten severe high blood pressure and lung disease and died at 68 with a
breathing tube in his mouth. “I knew that so many other people were going
to stay sick and die of the same thing,” Olsson explained. He wanted to
educate himself so he’d be prepared if something else happened to him or
his family. After the long days he spent running a software distribution company,
he’d come home and read medical books. He talked to doctors, sur geons,
instructors, and research scientists. Eventually he sold his business, got rid
of his nice cars and big house, got a divorce, and moved into a
condominium. Then he scaled down to a smaller apartment and spent six
years for going any salary, working almost entirely alone, trying to
understand the mysteries of health, medicine, and most specifically
breathing and the role of carbon dioxide in the body. “There were yogi
books about prana and then there were medical books focusing on
pathologies—blood gases and disease and CP AP,” he said. In short, Olsson found what I’d found, but years earlier: that there was a
gap in our knowledge about the science of breathing and its role in our
bodies. He discovered that we’d done a good job of examining what causes
breathing problems but done little to explore how they first develop and
how we might prevent them. Olsson was in good company. Doctors had been complaining about this
for decades. “The field of respiratory physiology is expanding in all
directions, yet so preoccupied have most physiologists been with lung
volumes, ventilation, circulation, gas exchange, the mechanics of breathing,
the metabolic cost of breathing and the control of breathing that few have
paid much attention to the muscles that actually do the breathing,” one
physician wrote in 1958. Another wrote: “ Until the seventeenth century
most of the great physicians and anatomists were interested in the
respiratory muscles and the mechanics of breathing. Since then these
muscles have been increasingly neglected, lying as they do in a no-man’ s
land between anatomy and physiology. ”What many of these doctors found, and what Olsson would discover
much later, was that the best way to prevent many chronic health problems,
improve athletic performance, and extend longevity was to focus on how
we breathed, specifically to balance oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the
body. T o do this, we’d need to learn how to inhale and exhale slowly. •       •       •
How could inhaling smaller amounts of air and having more carbon dioxide
in our bloodstream increase oxygen in our tissues and or gans. How could
doing less give us more. T o understand this contrarian concept, you need to consider the body
parts beyond the nose and mouth. Those structures, after all, are simply the
gateways for the long journey of breath. The purpose of the 25,000 inhales
and exhales we take daily lies deeper inside us. And the farther we follow
this air, the more surprising and strange the journey gets. Y our body, like all human bodies, is essentially a collection of tubes. There are wide tubes, like the throat and sinuses, and very thin tubes like
capillaries. The tubes that make up the tissues of the lungs are very small,
and we’ve got a lot of them. If you lined up all the tubes in the airways of
your body, they’d reach from New Y ork City to Key W est— more than
1,500 miles. Each breath you take must first travel down the throat, past a crossroads
called the tracheal carina, which splits it into the right and left lungs. As it
keeps going, that breath gets pushed into smaller tubes called the
bronchioles until it dead-ends at 500 million little bulbs called the alveoli. What happens next is complicated and confusing. An analogy may help. Let’ s say you’re about to take a river cruise. Y ou’re in a waiting room at
the dock when a ship approaches. Y ou pass through security, board the ship,
and head of f. This is similar to the path oxygen molecules take once they
reach the alveoli. Each of these little “docking stations” is surrounded by a
river of plasma filled with red blood cells. As these cells pass by, oxygen
molecules will slip through the membranes of the alveoli and lodge
themselves inside one. The cellular cruise ship is filled with “guest rooms. ” In your blood cells,
those rooms are the protein called hemoglobin. Oxygen takes a seat inside ahemoglobin; then the red blood cells journey upstream, deeper into the
body. As blood passes through tissues and muscles, oxygen will disembark,
providing fuel to hungry cells. As oxygen of floads, other passengers,
namely carbon dioxide—the “waste product” of metabolism—will pile
aboard, and the cruise ship will begin a return journey back to the lungs. This exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide changes the appearance of
blood. The blood cells in the veins that carry more carbon dioxide will
appear blue; arterial blood, still filled with oxygen, will appear bright red. It’ s these gases that give veins and arteries their distinctive colors. Eventually, the cruise ship will make its round through the body and
back to port, back to the lungs, where carbon dioxide will exit the body
through the alveoli, up the throat, and out the mouth and nose in an exhale. More oxygen boards in the next breath and the process starts again. Every healthy cell in the body is fueled by oxygen, and this is how it’ s
delivered. The entire cruise takes about a minute, and the overall numbers
are staggering. Inside each of our 25 trillion red blood cells are 270 million
hemoglobin, each of which has room for four oxygen molecules. That’ s a
billion molecules of oxygen  boarding and disembarking within each red
blood cell cruise ship. There’ s nothing controversial about this process of respiration and the
role of carbon dioxide in gas exchange. It’ s basic biochemistry. What’ s less
acknowledged is the role carbon dioxide plays in weight loss. That carbon
dioxide in every exhale has weight, and we exhale more weight than we
inhale. And the way the body loses weight isn’ t through profusely sweating
or “burning it of f. ” W e lose weight through exhaled breath. For every ten pounds of fat lost in our bodies, eight and a half pounds of
it comes out through the lungs; most of it is carbon dioxide mixed with a bit
of water vapor. The rest is sweated or urinated out. This is a fact that most
doctors, nutritionists, and other medical professionals have historically
gotten wrong. The lungs are the weight-regulating system of the body. “Everyone always talks about oxygen,” Olsson told me during our
interview in Stockholm. “Whether we breathe thirty times or five times a
minute, a healthy body will always have enough oxygen. ”
What our bodies really want, what they require to function properly,
isn’ t faster or deeper breaths. It’ s not more air. What we need is more
carbon dioxide. •       •       •
More than a century ago, a baggy-eyed Danish physiologist named
Christian Bohr discovered this in a laboratory in Copenhagen. By his early
30s, Bohr had earned degrees in medicine and physiology and was working
at the University of Copenhagen. He was fascinated with respiration; he
knew that oxygen was the cellular fuel and that hemoglobin was the
transporter. He knew that when oxygen went into a cell, carbon dioxide
came out. But Bohr didn’ t know why  this exchange took place. Why did some
cells get oxygen more easily than others. What directed billions of
hemoglobin molecules to release oxygen at just the right place at the right
time. How did breathing really work. He began experimenting. Bohr gathered chickens, guinea pigs, grass
snakes, dogs, and horses, and measured how much oxygen the animals
consumed and how much carbon dioxide they produced. Then he drew
blood and exposed it to dif ferent mixtures of these gases. Blood with the
most carbon dioxide in it (more acidic) loosened oxygen from hemoglobin. In some ways, carbon dioxide worked as a kind of divorce lawyer, a go-
between to separate oxygen from its ties so it could be free to land another
mate. This discovery explained why certain muscles used during exercise
received more oxygen than lesser -used muscles. They were producing more
carbon dioxide, which attracted more oxygen. It was supply on demand, at a
molecular level. Carbon dioxide also had a profound dilating ef fect on
blood vessels, opening these pathways so they could carry more oxygen-
rich blood to hungry cells. Breathing less allowed animals to produce more
ener gy, more ef ficiently. Meanwhile, heavy and panicked breaths would pur ge carbon dioxide. Just a few moments of heavy breathing above metabolic needs could cause
reduced blood flow to muscles, tissues, and or gans. W e’d feel light-headed,
cramp up, get a headache, or even black out. If these tissues were denied
consistent blood flow for long enough, they’d break down. —
In 1904, Bohr published a paper called “Concerning a Biologically
Important Relationship—The Influence of the Carbon Dioxide Content ofBlood on Its Oxygen Binding. ” It was a sensation among scientists and
inspired a flurry of new research into this long-misunderstood gas. Soon
after, Y andell Henderson, the director of the Laboratory of Applied
Physiology at Y ale, began his own set of experiments. Henderson too had
spent the last several years studying metabolism, and, like Bohr, he was
convinced that carbon dioxide was as essential to the body as any vitamin. “ Although clinicians still find it hard to believe, oxygen is in no sense a
stimulant to living creatures,” Henderson would write in the Cyclopedia of
Medicine. “If a fire is supplied with pure oxygen instead of air, it burns with
enormously augmented intensity. But when a man or animal breathes
oxygen, or [air] enriched with oxygen, no more of that gas is consumed, no
more heat is produced and no more carbon dioxide is exhaled than when air
alone is breathed. ”
For a healthy body, overbreathing or inhaling pure oxygen would have
no benefit, no ef fect on oxygen delivery to our tissues and or gans, and
could actually create a state of oxygen deficiency, leading to relative
suf focation. In other words, the pure oxygen a quarterback might huf f
between plays, or that a jet-lagged traveler might shell out 50 dollars for at
an airport “oxygen bar,” are of no benefit. Inhaling the gas might increase
blood oxygen levels one or two percent, but that oxygen will never make it
into our hungry cells. W e’ll simply breathe it back out. *
T o prove his point, over the years Henderson conducted a number of
awful experiments on dogs that are about as dif ficult to read about as
Harvold’ s awful experiments on monkeys. He placed individual dogs on a table in his laboratory and inserted a
tube into their throats, fitting their faces with a rubber mask. At the end of
the tube was a hand bellows. The contraption allowed Henderson to control
how much air each dog took in and how often. He’d connected the tube
from the dogs’ throats to a bottle of ether, which would anesthetize them
during the course of the experiment. A suite of instruments recorded heart
rate, carbon dioxide, oxygen levels, and more. As Henderson pumped the bellows faster and faster, he watched heart
rates of the animals quickly increase from 40 up to 200 or more beats per
minute. The dogs would eventually have so much oxygen flowing through
their arteries, with so little carbon dioxide to of fload it, that muscles,
tissues, and or gans began failing. Some dogs would spasm uncontrollablyor drift into a coma. If Henderson kept pumping more air in, the animals
became so full of oxygen and so deficient in carbon dioxide that they died. Henderson killed dogs with their own breath. W ith the dogs that survived, he would pump the bellows slower and
watch as their heart rates immediately decreased to 40 beats per minute. It
wasn’ t the act of breathing that sped up and slowed the dogs’ heart rates; it
was the amount of carbon dioxide flowing through the bloodstream. Henderson then forced the dogs to breathe just slightly  harder than
normal, just above their metabolic needs, so that their heart rates were
mildly elevated and carbon dioxide levels a little deficient. This was a
condition of mild hyperventilation common in humans. The dogs grew agitated, confused, anxious, and glassy-eyed. The slight
overbreathing was inducing the same confused state that occurred during
altitude sickness or panic attacks. Henderson administered morphine and
other drugs to slow the animals’ heart rates closer to normal. The drugs
worked partly because, as Henderson observed, they helped raise carbon
dioxide levels. But there was another way to restore the animals to health: let them
breathe slowly. Whenever Henderson lowered the respiratory rate in
accordance with the dogs’ normal metabolism—from breathing 200 times a
minute to a normal rate—all the twitching, stupors, and anxiety went away. The animals stretched out and relaxed, their muscles loosened, and a
peacefulness washed over them. “Carbon dioxide is the chief hormone of the entire body; it is the only
one that is produced by every tissue and that probably acts on every or gan,”
Henderson later wrote. “Carbon dioxide is, in fact, a more fundamental
component of living matter than is oxygen. ”
•       •       •
I spent three days with Olsson in Stockholm. W e pored over tables and
graphs and talked about Bohr and Henderson and other storied pulmonauts. By the end of my trip, I finally understood how my own view of breathing
had been so limited, and so wrong, for so many years. And I finally
understood how Olsson had become so obsessed with this line of research,
why he’d given up his life as a software tycoon and downgraded to a tiny
apartment, surrounded by shelves of biochemistry textbooks, sleep tape,and carbon dioxide tanks. Why he’d spent so many months recording how
carbon dioxide levels changed inside his body with each new breathing
technique, how it af fected his blood pressure and his ener gy and stress
levels. I understood why only one person showed up for the first conference he
held on breathing, in 2010, and why, after honing his message and building
his research base, he was now something of a Swedish media star who
filled auditoriums, his grinning, perpetually tanned, rom-com face popping
up on newspapers, magazines, and nightly news shows. In these interviews,
he championed the therapeutic ef fects of nasal breathing and beseeched
audiences with the same message of slow breathing. I returned home to San Francisco, and Olsson and I kept in contact. Every few weeks I’d get a new email or a Skype call about some new long-
lost scientific discovery he’d just unearthed in a medical library. He’d
continued his self-experimentation too, always seeking to use his own body
to prove the power of breathing and wonders of the “metabolic waste
product,” carbon dioxide. This is how Olsson ended up, a year after our first meeting, in my living
room in San Francisco with a face mask V elcroed to his head and an EKG
electrode clipped to his ear. •       •       •
“Could you hand me the oximeter, please. ” Olsson says again across the
table. W e’ve just finished our afternoon testing, and Olsson is restrapping
himself into the BreathIQ, a prototype of a device that measures carbon
dioxide, ammonia, and other elements in the exhaled breath. He clips a
pulse oximeter on his finger and starts counting down the seconds. Maybe it’ s the carbon dioxide and nitric oxide boost from nasal
breathing, but we’re feeling punchy today. In addition to the five grand we
dropped to take before-and-after X-rays and blood and pulmonary function
tests at Stanford, Olsson and I also managed to amass several thousand
dollars’ worth of equipment at the home lab. W e’ve spent two weeks
running tests and have yet to push the throttle on it all. That’ s changing
today. Olsson wipes a hand on his Abercrombie sweatshirt and scoots over so
that I can see the readouts on the machines. All his vitals are normal: heart
rate hovers around 75, systolic blood pressure clocks in at 126, oxygen
levels at 97 percent. Thr ee, two, one,  he begins breathing. But slowly, very slowly. He inhales and exhales three times slower than
the average American, turning those 18 breaths a minute into six. As he sips
air in through his nose and out through his mouth, I watch as his carbon
dioxide levels rise from 5 percent to 6 percent. They keep rising. A minute
later, Olsson’ s levels are 25 percent higher than they were just a few
minutes ago, taking him from an unhealthy hypocapnic zone to squarely
within a medically normal range. All the while, his blood pressure drops
about five points and heart rate sinks to the mid-60s. What hasn’ t changed is his oxygen. From start to finish, even though
he’ s been breathing at a third of the rate considered normal, his oxygen
hasn’ t wavered: it stayed at 97 percent. W e’d experienced the same confounding measurements during our bike
workouts earlier in the week. The beginning of those workouts, like all
workouts, sucked. W e felt our lungs and respiratory system desperately
trying to meet the needs of our hungry tissues and muscles: the dinner rush
of the body. Normally, I’d open my mouth and huf f and puf f, trying to sate
that nagging need for oxygen. But for the last few days, as I cranked the
pedals harder and faster, I forced myself to breathe softer and slower. This
felt stifling and claustrophobic, like I was starving my body of fuel, until I
checked the pulse oximeter. Once again, no matter how slowly I breathed or
how hard I pedaled, my oxygen levels held steady at 97 percent. It turns out that when breathing at a normal rate, our lungs will absorb
only about a quarter of the available oxygen in the air. The majority of that
oxygen is exhaled back out. By taking longer breaths, we allow our lungs to
soak up more in fewer breaths. “If, with training and patience, you can perform the same exercise
workload with only 14 breaths per minute instead of 47 using conventional
techniques, what reason could there be not to do it. ” wrote John Douillard,
the trainer who’d conducted the stationary bike experiments in the 1990s. “When you see yourself running faster every day, with your breath rate
stable. you will begin to feel the true meaning of the word fitness. ”
I realized then that breathing was like rowing a boat: taking a zillion
short and stilted strokes will get you where you’re going, but they pale incomparison to the ef ficiency and speed of fewer, longer strokes. On the second day of using this slower, nasal breathing approach, I’d
outdistanced my mouthbreathing record by. 13 of a mile. The next session, I
pedaled. 36 miles farther—a 5 percent increase over mouthbreathing. By
my fifth ride on the stationary bike, I pedaled 7. 7 miles, almost a full mile
longer, in the same amount of time, using the same amount of ener gy, than I
had the previous week. This was a significant gain. It wasn’ t quite yet up to
the levels Douillard’ s cyclists reported, but I was edging closer. During that ride, I started playing around with my breathing. I tried to
inhale and exhale slower and slower, from my usual exercising rate of 20
breaths a minute to just six. I immediately felt a sense of air hunger and
claustrophobia. After a minute or so I looked down at the pulse oximeter to
see how much oxygen I was losing, how starved my body had become. But my oxygen hadn’ t decreased with these very slow breaths, as I or
anyone else might expect. My levels r ose. •       •       •
A last word on slow breathing. It goes by another name: prayer. When Buddhist monks chant their most popular mantra, Om Mani
Padme Hum, each spoken phrase lasts six seconds, with six seconds to
inhale before the chant starts again. The traditional chant of Om, the “sacred
sound of the universe” used in Jainism and other traditions, takes six
seconds to sing, with a pause of about six seconds to inhale. The sa ta na ma  chant, one of the best-known techniques in Kundalini
yoga, also takes six seconds to vocalize, followed by six seconds to inhale. Then there were the ancient Hindu hand and tongue poses called mudra s. A
technique called khechari, intended to help boost physical and spiritual
health and overcome disease, involves placing the tongue above the soft
palate so that it’ s pointed toward the nasal cavity. The deep, slow breaths
taken during this khechari  each take six seconds. Japanese, African,
Hawaiian, Native American, Buddhist, T aoist, Christian—these cultures
and religions all had somehow developed the same prayer techniques,
requiring the same breathing patterns. And they all likely benefited from the
same calming ef fect. In 2001, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy gathered two
dozen subjects, covered them with sensors to measure blood flow, heartrate, and nervous system feedback, then had them recite a Buddhist mantra
as well as the original Latin version of the rosary, the Catholic prayer cycle
of the A ve Maria, which is repeated half by a priest and half by the
congregation. They were stunned to find that the average number of breaths
for each cycle was “almost exactly” identical, just a bit quicker than the
pace of the Hindu, T aoist, and Native American prayers: 5. 5 breaths a
minute. But what was even more stunning was what breathing like this did to the
subjects. Whenever they followed this slow breathing pattern, blood flow to
the brain increased and the systems in the body entered a state of coherence,
when the functions of heart, circulation, and nervous system are
coordinated to peak ef ficiency. The moment the subjects returned to
spontaneous breathing or talking, their hearts would beat a little more
erratically, and the integration of these systems would slowly fall apart. A
few more slow and relaxed breaths, and it would return again. A decade after the Pavia tests, two renowned professors and doctors in
New Y ork, Patricia Gerbar g and Richard Brown, used the same breathing
pattern on patients with anxiety and depression, minus the praying. Some of
these patients had trouble breathing slowly, so Gerbar g and Brown
recommended they start with an easier rhythm of three-second inhales with
at least the same length exhale. As the patients got more comfortable, they
breathed in and breathed out longer. It turned out that the most ef ficient breathing rhythm occurred when
both the length of respirations and total breaths per minute were locked in
to a spooky symmetry: 5. 5-second inhales followed by 5. 5-second exhales,
which works out almost exactly to 5. 5 breaths a minute. This was the same
pattern of the rosary. The results were profound, even when practiced for just five to ten
minutes a day. “I have seen patients transformed by adopting regular
breathing practices,” said Brown. He and Gerbar g even used this slow
breathing technique to restore the lungs of 9/11 survivors who suf fered
from a chronic and painful cough caused by the debris, a horrendous
condition called ground-glass lungs. There was no known cure for this
ailment, and yet after just two months, patients achieved a significant
improvement by simply learning to practice a few rounds of slow breathing
a day. Gerbar g and Brown would write books and publish several scientific
articles about the restorative power of the slow breathing, which would
become known as “resonant breathing” or Coherent Breathing. The
technique required no real ef fort, time, or thoughtfulness. And we could do
it anywhere, at any time. “It’ s totally private,” wrote Gerbar g. “ Nobody
knows you’re doing it. ”
In many ways, this resonant breathing of fered the same benefits as
meditation for people who didn’ t want to meditate. Or yoga for people who
didn’ t like to get of f the couch. It of fered the healing touch of prayer for
people who weren’ t religious. Did it matter if we breathed at a rate of six or five seconds, or were a
half second of f. It did not, as long as the breaths were in the range of 5. 5. “W e believe that the rosary may have partly evolved because it
synchronized with the inherent cardiovascular (Mayer) rhythms, and thus
gave a feeling of wellbeing, and perhaps an increased responsiveness to the
religious message,” the Pavia researchers wrote. In other words, the
meditations, A ve Marias, and dozens of other prayers that had been
developed over the past several thousand years weren’ t all baseless. Prayer heals, especially when it’ s practiced at 5.
To get the diaphragm accustomed to a wider range, so that deep and easy breathing became unconscious.
What was the goal of the counting exercise that Dr. Stough performed on the Yale track team?
The athletes suffered from the same "respiratory weakness" as the general population, and he found that they were not using their diaphragm effectively, leading to asthma and other respiratory issues.
What did Dr. Stough find in his work with the Yale track team?
They used the same slow and relaxed breathing technique to help patients with anxiety and depression.
What did Dr. Henderson and Dr. Brown do with patients with anxiety and depression?
He found that patients with hypertension, high blood pressure, and other chronic diseases all showed improvement in their conditions after learning to breathe less and increase their carbon dioxide levels.
What was the result of Dr. Buteyko's research on patients with chronic diseases?
To train the body to breathe less and increase carbon dioxide levels in the body, which can lead to improved health, endurance, and longevity.
What is the goal of the "Breathing Coordination" therapy, as described in the text?