Introduction
They told crazy stories, about how they’d breathed in ways that expanded the size of their lungs by 30 percent or more. They told me about an Indian doctor who lost several pounds by simply changing the way he inhaled, and about another man who was injected with the bacterial endotoxin E. coli, then breathed in a rhythmic pattern to stimulate his immune system and destroy the toxins within minutes. They told me about women who put their cancers into remission and monks who could melt circles in the snow around their bare bodies over a period of several hours. It all sounded nuts.
It does sound nuts, and I’m hoping this book doesn’t end up being a breathing-cures-all sales pitch for snake oil.
She never checked the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your bloodstream. How you breathe and the quality of each breath were not on the menu.
The more we learn about our bodies (and the world) the longer of a list create to track, monitor, and attempt to exert control over. It’s not sustainable and may be unfair to expect doctors to examine every feature of our being every visit. However, the knowledge is still valuable. I wonder how many things on this “list” could be dealt with by aligning harmony and default modes of operation into our behavior, as opposed to having a checklist to daily validate?
They discovered that our capacity to breathe has changed through the long processes of human evolution, and that the way we breathe has gotten markedly worse since the dawn of the Industrial Age. They discovered that 90 percent of us—very likely me, you, and almost everyone you know—is breathing incorrectly and that this failure is either causing or aggravating a laundry list of chronic diseases.
Not surprising as we continue to venture further from our roots and look to suppress our inconvenient biology. I expect this is not new, though, just accelerated. How much damage has religion done over the ages in attempts to control people? Even with good intentions (setting aside abuse) there are almost always side effects.
The missing pillar in health is breath. It all starts there.
Overstated, but I understand the point.
Part One: The Experiment
One: The Worst Breathers in the Animal Kingdom
Evans and Boyd then compared the ancient skulls to the modern skulls of their own patients and others. Every modern skull had the opposite growth pattern, meaning the angles of the Frankfort plane and N-perpendicular were reversed: chins had recessed behind foreheads, jaws were slumped back, sinuses shrunken. All the modern skulls showed some degree of crooked teeth.
Of the 5,400 different species of mammals on the planet, humans are now the only ones to routinely have misaligned jaws, overbites, underbites, and snaggled teeth, a condition formally called malocclusion.
Today, the human body is changing in ways that have nothing to do with the “survival of the fittest.” Instead, we’re adopting and passing down traits that are detrimental to our health.
Two: Mouthbreathing
The readouts reveal what the previous days have revealed: mouthbreathing is destroying our health.
Tangentially, I’m starting to consider re-evaluating my departure from quantified self. It was too easy to obsess about heart rate, oxygen levels, stress levels, and more every minute of the day. In aggregate, however, there would seem to be value in how lifestyle changes impact broader health trends in my life. Maybe there’s a balance to be found where I wear a monitoring watch but don’t display the data, and only view it in aggregate at a week or month at a time?
When we run our cells aerobically with oxygen, we gain some 16 times more energy efficiency over anaerobic. The key for exercise, and for the rest of life, is to stay in that energy-efficient, clean-burning, oxygen-eating aerobic zone for the vast majority of time during exercise and at all times during rest.
Inhaling from the nose has the opposite effect. It forces air against all those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and breathing easier. After a while, these tissues and muscles get “toned” to stay in this opened and wide position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal breathing.
Mouthbreathing causes the body to lose 40 percent more water.
Ninety percent of children have acquired some degree of deformity in their mouths and noses. Forty-five percent of adults snore occasionally when sleeping, and a quarter of the population snores constantly. Twenty-five percent of American adults over 30 choke on themselves because of sleep apnea; and an estimated 80 percent of moderate or severe cases are undiagnosed.
Part Two: The Lost Art and Science of Breathing
Three: Nose
Everything you or I or any other breathing thing has ever put in its mouth, or in its nose, or soaked in through its skin, is hand-me-down space dust that’s been around for 13.8 billion years. This wayward matter has been split apart by sunlight, spread throughout the universe, and come back together again. To breathe is to absorb ourselves in what surrounds us, to take in little bits of life, understand them, and give pieces of ourselves back out. Respiration is, at its core, reciprocation.
Few of us ever consider how the nostrils of every living person pulse to their own rhythm, opening and closing like a flower in response to our moods, mental states, and perhaps even the sun and the moon.
The interior of the nose, it turned out, is blanketed with erectile tissue, the same flesh that covers the penis, clitoris, and nipples. Noses get erections. Within seconds, they too can engorge with blood and become large and stiff. This happens because the nose is more intimately connected to the genitals than any other organ; when one gets aroused, the other responds. The mere thought of sex for some people causes such severe bouts of nasal erections that they’ll have trouble breathing and will start to sneeze uncontrollably, an inconvenient condition called “honeymoon rhinitis.”
In a single breath, more molecules of air will pass through your nose than all the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches—trillions and trillions of them.
Four: Exhale
They gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity.
A typical adult engages as little as 10 percent of the range of the diaphragm when breathing, which overburdens the heart, elevates blood pressure, and causes a rash of circulatory problems. Extending those breaths to 50 to 70 percent of the diaphragm’s capacity will ease cardiovascular stress and allow the body to work more efficiently.
Martin asked me to start counting from one to ten over and over with every exhale. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10—then keep repeating it,” she said. At the end of the exhale, when I was so out of breath I couldn’t vocalize anymore, I was to keep counting, but to do so silently, letting my voice trail down into a “sub-whisper.” I ran through a few rounds, counting quickly and loudly, then silently mouthing the numbers. 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.
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.
Five: Slow
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.
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.
The slight overbreathing was inducing the same confused state that occurred during altitude sickness or panic attacks.
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.
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 efficiency. 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.
Six: Less
The less one breathes, the more one absorbs the warming touch of respiratory efficiency
Given that the nose warms, moistens, and filters the air this means that we are bring less cold, dry, and polluted air into the body. By using more of what is already in our lungs we expose it to far less quantities of harmful things.
Seven: Chew
Our ancient ancestors chewed for hours a day, every day. And because they chewed so much, their mouths, teeth, throats, and faces grew to be wide and strong and pronounced. Food in industrialized societies was so processed that it hardly required any chewing at all.
Bodes well for me, I find soft foods boring and prefer a good hard crunch!
Part Three: Breathing+
Eight: More, on Occasion
The lungs are covered with nerves that extend to both sides of the autonomic nervous system, and many of the nerves connecting to the parasympathetic system are located in the lower lobes, which is one reason long and slow breaths are so relaxing. As molecules of breath descend deeper, they switch on parasympathetic nerves, which send more messages for the organs to rest and digest.
People have evolved to spend the majority of waking hours—and all of our sleeping hours—in this state of recovery and relaxation. Chilling out helped make us human.
Simpler and less intense methods of breathing slow, less, through the nose with a big exhale, can also diffuse stress and restore balance. These techniques can be life-changing, and I’d seen dozens of people changed by them. But they can also take a while, especially for those with long-standing chronic conditions.
This coincides with the know benefits of meditation as well, which also impacts breathing. I really need to set aside daily time for breath work (and meditation).
To some researchers, it’s no coincidence that eight of the top ten most common cancers affect organs cut off from normal blood flow during extended states of stress.
This flip-flopping—breathing all-out, then not at all, getting really cold and then hot again—is the key to Tummo’s magic. It forces the body into high stress one minute, a state of extreme relaxation the next. Carbon dioxide levels in the blood crash, then they build back up. Tissues become oxygen deficient and then flooded again. The body becomes more adaptable and flexible and learns that all these physiological responses can come under our control. Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken.
Sounds like Deadpool’s origin story.
During rest, about 750 milliliters of blood—enough to fill a full wine bottle—flows through the brain every minute.
Nine: Hold It
Up to 80 percent of office workers (according to one estimate) suffer from something called continuous partial attention. We’ll scan our email, write something down, check Twitter, and do it all over again, never really focusing on any specific task. In this state of perpetual distraction, breathing becomes shallow and erratic. Sometimes we won’t breathe at all for a half minute or longer.
Ten: Fast, Slow, and Not at All
The Indus-Sarasvati was the largest geographically—some 300,000 square miles—and one of the most advanced of ancient human civilizations. As far as is known, the Indus Valley had no churches or temples or sacred spaces. The people who lived there produced no praying sculptures, no iconography. Palaces, castles, and imposing governmental buildings didn’t exist.
I had no idea that there were completely agnostic civilizations that long ago. Even today, largely agnostic civilizations still produce some religious artifacts.
Versions of kriya had been around since 400 BCE, and by some accounts were used by everyone from Krishna to Jesus Christ, Saint John to Patanjali.
We would be well served by exercising more tolerance and acceptance as illustrated here, instead of vilifying anything not deemed native to one religious sect.
Epilogue: A Last Gasp
Breathing is a key input. From what I’ve learned in the past decade, that 30 pounds of air that passes through our lungs every day and that 1.7 pounds of oxygen our cells consume is as important as what we eat or how much we exercise. Breathing is a missing pillar of health.
Feinstein believes that people with anxiety likely suffer from connection problems between these areas and could unwittingly be holding their breath throughout the day. Only when the body becomes overwhelmed by carbon dioxide would their chemoreceptors kick in and trigger an emergency signal to the brain to immediately get another breath. The patients would reflexively start fighting to breathe. They’d panic.
The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air.
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