The 4 breathing secrets that will transform your health today with James Nestor

Most of us never question how we breathe. Yet many of us over-breathe or mouth-breathe without realising it. In this episode, investigative journalist and international bestselling author James Nestor shares four breathing techniques that aim to retrain your nervous system and support better health.

James, who has spent over a decade researching breathing science with leading respiratory experts, including Stanford researchers, guides us through daily breathing habits to help calm your body, improve oxygen efficiency, and support long-term wellbeing. We explore why nasal breathing is more efficient, how slow breathing can influence the nervous system, and how modern lifestyles may have reshaped our airways. 

If breathing is something you do 20,000 times a day, what might change if you retrained it?

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Jonathan: James, thank you so much for joining me today.

James: Thanks for having me.

Jonathan: So we like to kick off our show here at ZOE with a rapid-fire Q&A with questions from our listeners. Are you willing to give it a go?

James: I am.

Jonathan: Good. And we have some very strict rules. You can say yes or no, or if you have to, one sentence.

James: Okay.

Jonathan: Are most people breathing wrong?

James: Yes.

Jonathan: Did you once plug your nose with silicone for 10 days in the name of science?

James: Yes.

Jonathan: Is breathing through your mouth healthy?

James: No.

Jonathan: Does mouth taping work?

James: For some people.

Jonathan: What's the biggest thing that people get wrong about breathing?

James: They breathe too much.

Jonathan: They breathe too much. Who knew that was a thing? Now, if you're listening to this right now, obviously you're breathing. I've been doing it all my life, and until about 15 seconds ago, I never put any thought into it, but now I'm worrying that I'm doing it apparently too much. And our listeners, it sounds like, might be doing this as well. How did you first get interested in breathing?

James: It wasn't something I set out to do journalistically. I was having a bunch of respiratory problems, and I wasn't finding any long-term relief from them. I was getting bronchitis every year. I was getting mild pneumonia every year, and I noticed that my breathing was becoming more labored every year, even though I was eating the right food, sleeping eight hours a night, all that stuff. Finally, it got to the point where I was worried that I had a serious problem. Every time I went to the doctor, I was given antibiotics. This was before, of course, we knew what antibiotics do to your gut microbiome, and it wasn't until a doctor friend of mine suggested I check out a breathwork class, a breathing class. I'd never done anything like this. That was my entree into this world.

Jonathan: Like very much a journey driven by your own personal health questions that then became something that you investigated and wanted to understand yourself.

James: Yeah. And that was about 13 years ago, you know, 13, 14 years ago. And I'm not going to say what happened to me is going to happen for everybody, but I have not had one of those issues since. There isn't a control version of me, we can't compare it. But once I learned the foundations of proper breathing, I noticed my sleep was better, my energy levels were better. I could exercise longer, and I was convinced it was more than a placebo effect. And so I started exploring the science, which is what you're supposed to do if you're a journalist, you know? And so it got me curious that maybe there was a larger story here. I brought it to my literary agent. She thought it was an absolutely terrible book idea. And this is all true, I kept researching it for my own personal growth, you know, for my personal health. I've noticed what it did for me. And I came back to her after several years and I said there might be a larger story here. She still wasn't convinced, but she was tired of me begging, and so we put together the proposal. That's how this book came about. There was no preconceived notion, there was no looking at if people were even interested in this subject. This was something I was deeply invested in from a personal standpoint and thought, again, that there might be an untold story, you know, that was hiding beneath all this stuff that we see online.

Jonathan: Now, since your book was published, which I think was in 2020, the first—yes, that's right—release. It seems like breathwork has become incredibly popular. Why do you think it's somehow taken the world by storm? And yet just beforehand, you're saying that your editor is saying, "Oh, I don't think anyone will be interested in this."

James: The book came out, was released about six weeks into lockdown, into COVID, you know, and so I think that when people were denied the ability to breathe, they started to understand that this might be an important thing. That they might want to reconsider, especially people with long COVID who had really bad cases. It could take them weeks or months to rehabilitate themselves, and they noticed what a difference it made once they were able to do that. So I think that was the thing that really brought public awareness to it. Now you see breathwork everywhere. It's really everywhere. My problem with some of that, and some of what is being taught, is people aren't teaching the foundations. They're not teaching the absolute essentials, which are how to become a normal breather first.

Jonathan: This is now quite a long journey that you're talking about. You're saying sort of 13, 14 years ago that you started, and you've been, you know, spreading the word about how to breathe correctly now for, you know, six years since the book came out to much longer. What maintains your passion here?

James: I think it's a number of things. I continue to feel the effects of proper breathing, and it's mostly the thousands of letters that I've received from people. And every time I do an event, I do a public speaking engagement, there's a line of people, and a lot of them are really angry, and some of them are very happy, and they all have questions that no one else is answering for them. In some ways, that should make me feel really good that I'm the guy that they come to. But it's extremely frustrating to me that I have to be the person to give them health advice. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a clinician, I'm not a respiratory therapist, but they're not able to find it anywhere else. And so one of the reasons I'm coming back out with this is, you know, there's a new version of the book, but also in addition to that, I've said this message numerous times, expecting there to be some sort of systemic change because the science is there, the research is there. It's been there for decades. Nothing's happening. So I think it's part of my service now to try to bring these simple, free things into people's consciousness and allow them to help diagnose and, in some cases, cure themselves of these chronic issues.

Jonathan: You know, you started with the Q&A at the beginning of saying this amazing thing: most people are breathing wrong, and everyone is automatically breathing thousands of times each day. Right. What is it about breathing in humans, and how you say breathing has sort of gone wrong for us?

James: So I could say the same thing about nutrition, right? You're a ZOE nutrition company. I would imagine maybe 50% of the population are just eating what's in front of them. They're not thinking about carbs or protein or sugar. It's just there. And to them, they would be pretty surprised. It'd be like, "What do you mean I'm eating wrong? What do you mean I'm eating too many carbs? What do you mean I'm eating too much sugar? I'm eating too many ultra-processed foods." I think that we have become habituated to eat in a certain way, to sit around in offices in a certain way, to sleep in a certain way, and none of the ways in which we do these things are healthy, but they are so common because our parents did it, and their grandparents did it, and our kids are doing it, and breathing fits right into that. Just because you're able to take an inhale and exhale doesn't mean you're doing it in an optimum way. You could say someone who has emphysema, who can barely get a breath in, they're still breathing, but they're not breathing in an optimum way. Not many of us are at that far end of the spectrum, but we're usually kind of right in the middle. How many people do you know that snore, or have sleep apnea, or have asthma, or that have difficulty exercising, who have chronic congestion? I can go on and on. And it turns out that the majority of people are breathing dysfunctionally. They don't realize it, and the sad thing is they don't realize that a lot of the downstream issues that they're having, be it headaches or back pain or ADHD symptoms, are tied to the ways in which they're breathing, and they're breathing in a very dysfunctional way.

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Jonathan: Can you help me to understand what breathing wrong means?

James: This is breathing wrong. Notice my posture. Notice I'm breathing out of my mouth. Notice my shoulders are down. Now just imagine if you're breathing wrong this way. Every breath I take can't really efficiently go into my lungs because I'm hunched over, right? So it gets stuck in my throat and my mouth and the bronchi, all of these different areas that don't participate in gas exchange. So what I'm doing is I'm just using energy to bring breath into my body and exhale it, but that breath isn't used. It's almost like eating a bunch of food and then vomiting it up. All of those oxygen molecules aren't used. So that's one part of it. And if you are hunched over like this, and you're breathing inefficiently, you're only able to use a small percentage of that oxygen that comes in, you are then stressing your body out because you have to breathe so much more to get a simple breath of air, right? So you're sending your brain messages that you are stressed. And how many people do this all day long in front of a computer? Go in any office, and the vast majority of people are doing this. If I switch that around, look at proper breathing, I've got proper posture. So when I take a breath in, the diaphragm naturally descends. I can take far fewer breaths, I can get much more oxygen, so it's much more efficient. And when I'm breathing longer, deeper, fewer breaths per minute, I'm sending my brain messages that I'm calm.

Jonathan: And I just want to make sure for many of the listeners who are listening to this on audio, not seeing you, like you suddenly, like your shoulders are lower, your whole body is lower, you sort of slump forward. And it looked like you are sort of saying that the only thing that's moving is really sort of the top of my chest as I'm breathing. Is that right? Did I catch that right?

James: That's right, yes.

Jonathan: And whereas now suddenly you've sort of stood up like a good few inches higher, your head's sort of higher. And then when you talk about your diaphragm, this is sort of like at the bottom of my torso. Is that right? That's going, is that the diaphragm?

James: The diaphragm sits underneath the lungs. And when you inhale, the diaphragm, which is shaped like a parachute, descends down. It flexes downward. Okay? And when you exhale, that diaphragm flexes up. You need that movement in the diaphragm to be breathing properly. You also need it to help digest food better and give all those essential organs down here a massage so that they can function more efficiently. So most of us are not breathing this way. We are breathing into our chest. Many of us tend to breathe through our mouths, so we are requiring our bodies to do so much more to get so much less, and that is dysfunctional breathing.

Jonathan: And how much of that is these digital devices, and how much of it is like other changes in society, because it sounded like you're talking about a rather longer time period as you were saying that we are getting breathing wrong.

James: So over millions of years, the human body developed and evolved to be in an environment in which we were moving, right? In which we were gathering food all day, in which we were outside and not inside. So all of these changes to our skeletal musculature, everything happened over a very long time to accommodate that environment. That's why we're around today, because we were able to adapt. In the past few hundred years, we've gone from that to spending 90% of our time indoors, and almost all of that for many people in chairs. So our bodies have not been able to adapt to this sudden shift of our environment. You can ask any chiropractor or physio or whoever you want to talk to what this has done to our backs, what this has done to our eyesight. 90% of kids now in some countries have myopia. That didn't suddenly happen randomly, that happened as a result of this mismatch between how their bodies evolved to one environment and why their bodies are now stuck in another environment. So that has also affected our breathing where we sit around all day long, and many of us in chairs that are not ergonomical, right? And we are forced to hunch over like this all day long. So you can get by breathing this way, right? You can stay alive just like you can get by eating 10 donuts a day. You probably have enough calories you could get by for a few years doing that. That doesn't mean it's healthy, and this is what so many people are doing, and it's one of the reasons why they're suffering from so many downstream issues because of that.

Jonathan: So this is like junk food breathing.

James: It is absolutely junk breathing. That's what it is. This is ultra-processed breathing.

Jonathan: And if I understand rightly, you're saying for you the biggest thing is this shift to like sitting in chairs all the time, which is obviously a bit longer than the laptops, that this is sort of what's hunching us over and like being stationary, that that's the profound shift.

James: Sure. That's one of the postural shifts, so that's changed our posture. There's the mental shift in which we are so habituated to be in this constant state of stress, and that constant state of stress affects our breathing. We breathe shallow, we breathe light. We tend to breathe through our mouth. There is also the structural change that has happened to us. Our mouths are too small. And over the past few hundred years, we went from being a species that had straight teeth, that had a very wide mouth, and with a wide mouth, you have a larger airway. With that larger airway, it's easier to breathe. Now 90% of us have a mouth that is so small that we have some crookedness in our teeth, right? I had crooked teeth, I had extractions. Most people have this. If you think about what that's done to our teeth, you can also consider what it's done to our airways.

Jonathan: My wife claims that I snore badly. James, I obviously deny this because, I mean, I don't hear myself snore. I'm sure she's exaggerating, but she seems pretty convinced about it, so I have a little suspicion she might be right. Does any of this help to explain why I snore?

James: So right now, I want you to take a big breath through your mouth and try to move that soft palate in the back of your throat. Make a snoring sound. It's very easy, right? Okay. Now what I'd like you to do is take a very slow, soft breath through your nose, inhaling and exhaling. Very slow and silent. Soft, and try to make that sound. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, he is breathing right now. You can't hear him because he is breathing adequately. I'm not going to say correctly, but adequately. So much so that he cannot make that snoring sound.

Jonathan: I mean, I would just say like I couldn't make the snoring sound. I was a bit disappointed. I only got adequately though. So clearly by the end of this show, I want to know that I'm breathing correctly because I do have this strong desire to be doing things right. Help me to understand what you were just explaining to me.

James: So what I tried to just demonstrate right there was that if you are an over-breather in the daytime, right? This is how you are constantly breathing, taking big, long breaths. You will tend to be much more apt to snore. Okay? If you are over-breathing, and this is something Patrick McKeown has done a lot of research into, if you then adopt healthier breathing habits, breathing more slowly, fluidly like you were just doing through the nose. There are some people that say that can carry over into how you breathe at night. So slower, softer breathing at night, much harder to make that snoring sound. Now, that's not the only thing that affects snoring at the back of your mouth. There are those tissues, right? A lot of us get flabbiness in those tissues because we don't chew, we don't chew real food. And our ancestors were chewing for three to four hours a day, right? So you could tone, you could actually tone your airway by chewing real food. And if you don't want to chew real food—this seems a bit ironic here, me talking on the ZOE podcast, you're already chewing real food—you can do exercises with your tongue and your mouth that simulate these chewing motions, right? And they've found that these can be extremely effective for snoring and sleep apnea. Makes sense? If that flabbiness is in the back of your mouth, if that's toned, it's going to be harder for it to flop around in the wind. Right?

Jonathan: And this is real science, so they say you can do this exercise. And my tongue basically becomes like, it's got its own tongue abs, and suddenly I don't get that sort of flappy sound, which is the noise of the snoring.

James: It's so real that scientists had to name it some awful, confusing name called oropharyngeal exercises. So I prefer just to call it snoring exercises, mouth exercises, tongue exercises. It's not just the tongue. There is a whole new system set up called myofunctional therapy, which they teach kids proper oral posture, how to use their tongues. They also teach this to adults, and this can be very effective for snoring. Just to be clear, if you are extremely obese, your snoring and sleep apnea is likely caused by this lateral compression from all of the extra flesh and fat around your neck. Okay? And this is the same thing that affects weightlifters, right? When they have too many muscles around their necks, they can suffer from sleep apnea. So the third thing is nasal breathing versus mouth breathing, and if you are a mouth breather, you are going to be much more apt to suffer from snoring. And this is real stuff too. So those three things together, right, I would address those first. If you are a snorer, it is not cute, it is not quaint. Your body is struggling to breathe at night, and that is going to have a bunch of downstream issues.

Jonathan: Are you saying that if I'm snoring, that it's actually bad for my long-term health?

James: That is a warning sign. Yes, I'm absolutely saying that. It is stressing your body out at the time when your body needs to rest and recover.

Jonathan: It's really interesting. I never really thought about it like that. I'd always just thought about it as something really annoying for your partner, which obviously it is, and not being able to sleep well because your partner is snoring is one of those things that drives you mad. But you're saying actually for myself as well, breathing is important. So if I am snoring, it's a sign that I'm struggling in some way. And you're also saying that because of the change in sort of the food we eat, my muscles in my mouth and tongue are just much less developed because, you know, we used to eat all sorts of hard and chewy things you dug up from the ground, not ultra-processed sort of baby food type stuff. And so basically I've just got all of this soft tissue, and in the past, it would've just been much stronger. This is, I mean, I made the joke about like the abs on my tongue, but you're saying it really is a difference. Like I just am flabby where I would've been sort of muscled in the past.

James: That is a safe assumption to make. In addition, your mouth is likely going to be smaller than it should be because almost everybody has this. Right.

Jonathan: I understand your explanation for all of this shift in terms of sort of how we live and how we eat, except about the mouth size. Do we know why our mouth is smaller than it was?

James: We absolutely do. It goes down to chewing. So we had straight teeth all over. And if you don't believe me, look at ancient skulls. Spend a lot of time looking at ancient skulls. All of our ancestors had straight teeth, okay? And these huge palates, like these enormous mouths. With that large mouth, you're going to have a larger airway, larger sinus areas, right? So we can pinpoint the exact point at which people started getting small mouths. And it happened right when industrialized food came into the food supply. So England was one of the first countries to have industrialized food, England and France. Right. And we can see in a single generation of adopting industrialized food, 50% of the population will have crooked teeth, 50%. In the next generation, around 70%, and the next generation around 80%. Robert Corruccini spent 40 years researching this, 250 different scientific papers, I think three or four different books. Irrefutable, so we can actually see what happens. They've even done experiments with animals, serving pigs the exact same food. One group of pigs was fed the soft version of that food, the other the hard version of that food, and it changes your mouth size.

Jonathan: So you're saying that if I'm having to chew really hard, then actually my mouth, like the skull itself gets bigger as a result of eating.

James: When you are developing as a kid, once we're 17, 18, you can still improve a lot of things. They have expansion devices that can restore your mouth. You can do this myofunctional therapy, oropharyngeal exercises, all of this stuff. But it is most essential from the time in which you are breastfed to be converted to real food. So that's your chewing, because if you build a good foundation early on, then you carry that with you into adulthood. And if you think about the stuff I was fed, I was bottle-fed. You know, my mom had three kids. She's like, this was not something you were doing in the seventies. And I was bottle-fed and then onto Gerber's soft, soft food. This is not the way to do it.

Jonathan: And so if I was eating hard food that I need to really chew to get the sustenance out of, then all of that like exercise, it's not just the muscles we were talking about before, but actually sort of the bone itself ends up being bigger. The shape of my jaw is bigger. I remember somebody telling me that the bread that people were eating in like the French Revolution, like if we bit into it now, you'd lose a tooth because it was so hard and chewy. This is what you're saying, like that it's really hard, and then you move to this like perfectly milled modern bread, and so you just didn't need to chew it anymore.

James: It doesn't need to be the perfect hard food because all populations everywhere, eating different diets, had straight teeth, had large mouths. So what we used to do is kids were breastfed for two to four, in some cultures even six to eight years. And when you are breastfed as an infant, it pulls your face outward, okay? And it expands your palate. This is what it does. And I promised myself not to talk about this anymore because whenever a man is telling mothers about breastfeeding, I've gotten a bunch of angry letters. What I'm telling you and all the listeners out here is I'm conveying information, okay? I'm not making judgments on anybody. I know how hard it is to be a modern mother. I'm just telling you what I have learned from the experts in the field. They said when you are breastfed for that long exclusively, it pulls the face out. And if you think about the pressure and the coordination required for breastfeeding, not only is it opening up that palate and making for a larger mouth, but it is training these infants to be obligate nasal breathers because they're breastfeeding for three, four hours a day. Right? And the only way you can feed and breathe is through your nose. And then if you move from breast milk to hard foods, regular foods. So Gerber's and applesauce, and this is new stuff. Okay? All the carrot mush stuff. This is new stuff. Kids were moved from breastfeeding to hard foods. This expands the upper palate. It enables them to grow that proper skeletal structure. And with that, you have a larger airway, not a theory. This is known stuff that's been researched over decades.

Jonathan: It's fascinating. Can we talk now about this breathing through your nose versus your mouth? Because you've mentioned a number of times now sort of how it's much better to breathe through my nose. What's so special about my nose?

James: So this is your first line of defense against allergens, against viruses, against bacteria. So this is your filter, right? So we have nasal hairs. Most people clip those out, and then we have all these different structures that this air is forced to go through. There are these different baffles that pressurize this air as we inhale. You can take an inhale through your mouth, then you can try to take that same inhale and that same amount of time through your nose. It takes a lot longer, right? There's a lot more pressure. We need that pressure, and we need that filtering so when that air comes into our lungs, it is cleansed of all the pollutants that are in the outside environment. And if you don't, you're much more susceptible to have respiratory infections. I was a mouth breather my whole life. You're in an environment with a lot of dust, with a lot of pollen. This is going to exacerbate that inflammation.

Jonathan: I've never done that experiment before. Just copying you, breathing in through my mouth and my nose. And you're right, it takes me longer to breathe in through my nose than through my mouth. If anyone listening hasn't tried it, try it right now. It's rather extraordinary. Could you explain to me a bit more what's going on inside my head? Then like I think in my simple idea, my nose is still connected to the back of my throat, so it sort of should happen at the same pace. Why is it slower in my nose, and how is that protecting my lungs in the way you're describing?

James: If you were having a huge, huge bowl of food, right? Is it better to eat all of that food in three minutes as most people do, or to calmly eat that food over the course of that half an hour? You can digest it so much better. Okay. The lungs are working in the same way. So all of these different structures in your nose that are built to slow this air down, to filter it, right? They are there for a reason. We evolved to have these, so when that air enters our lungs, it enters more slowly and it exits more slowly, and it is pressurized. That allows the lungs to absorb so much more oxygen than just going... That's the main key there. There are so many other benefits, but if you're talking about just the foundational part of the efficiency, that's it. You can breathe fewer breaths, slower breaths, and get so much more oxygen than you could, which is why it drives me crazy when people are at altitude. They don't know better, so I'm not blaming anyone. Or if they're exercising and they're jogging, it's sort of a medium pace, and they're just thinking they're getting more oxygen. They're not, they're doing the opposite. That's why their fingers are tingling. They're always cold.

Jonathan: When I am just thinking about exercise now. I'm now thinking more about breathing than I have done in my previous 50 years, James. So, you know, I know it's a bit slow going round one by one, telling people, but I'm definitely making me think about this when I'm pushing myself really hard. I feel like I would then shift to breathing through my mouth. Is that right?

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James: About 90% of the exercise that people are doing can and should be done through the nose. There are some stages of deep zone four, zone five, when you are absolutely sprinting, you're doing CrossFit, you're in martial arts, whatever. Elite trainers are now teaching athletes to use mouth breathing as a shift into fifth gear, right? To consciously say, my body can benefit from a few mouth breaths as you dunk on someone's head, and then you go back to breathing through the nose. So there's a time and place for everything. If it's conscious. What I'm talking about is the vast majority of our time, we are not in zone four, not zone five. We are not even exercising. We're sitting down, and if you're sitting down or you're standing, breathing through the nose is going to be so much more beneficial, not only from that efficiency side, but because you release about six times more nitric oxide breathing through the nose. This is this miraculous molecule that helps expand blood vessels, helps deliver more blood more easily around your body. It's what they use in erectile dysfunction drugs. The way those things work is nitric oxide. It's a vasodilator, so it dilates the blood vessels down south, but it also dilates the blood vessels all over the place. And you can do this naturally breathing through your nose.

Jonathan: So if I breathe through my nose, I get a lot more nitric oxide in my blood.

James: Yes, yes. You get just doing that. That vibration releases much more nitric oxide, which goes to your lungs and goes into your blood. This is one of the most essential molecules in the body, especially for oxygen delivery, and most of us are deficient in it, which is why there's all these crazy supplements and stuff out there now.

James: I did not want to do this. Tried to get a bunch of other people to do this. We wanted to get a study done with about 50 people, break them up into two groups, you know, 25 controls, 25 who were going to do it. The rhinologist, the chief rhinology expert at Stanford, Jayakar Nayak, laughed at that. It would cost a million dollars. The other thing he said was that it would be unethical for him to conduct that study, knowing all the damage this would cause someone just to be a mouth breather. So he allowed us to use his lab. We still had to pay for the experiment for two people. That was the max amount allowed, and for 10 days we put silicone in our noses and were mouth breathers. A lot of people say, "Oh, this is like a Super Size Me stunt." But if you look at the amount of people chronically mouth breathing, especially people with chronic congestion, I did not view it that way. I viewed it as I'm putting myself into the place of such a huge percentage of the population that does not realize they're doing this and does not realize the damage they're doing to themselves. So it was 10 days of forced mouth breathing followed by 10 days of nasal breathing as often as we could, and we compared data sets from that and everything we thought was going to happen happened. So there were no real surprises other than this was so much more miserable than I ever imagined it would be.

Jonathan: So what happened?

James: If you look at sleep, I think that that was the biggest thing. I don't snore. I have never snored, and I track my sleep pretty religiously. The very first night of forced mouth breathing—first night, didn't take, not first month, not first year—first night, my snoring increased to about an hour and a half, and about three days later, it was about four hours a night. It stayed there, and it kept getting worse through this 10-day period. The other person in the experiment had the exact same reaction. We even developed sleep apnea. Neither of us had sleep apnea, but we started choking on ourselves just by changing the pathway in which we were breathing air. So I had heard about this. It had been established that during allergy season, snoring goes through the roof because the nose gets congested, people start breathing through their mouths at night. But it was something completely different to experience it yourself and to feel so awful in the morning. And to watch our sleep scores just absolutely plummet across the board. The first few nights, it was funny, we were recording ourselves, even with a video camera. We had all these gadgets. And then after a few days, it just wasn't funny anymore. It was really painful, and it just made me really, really sad that a journalist had to be the one doing this research when we have so many researchers out there that could do this in a real way. I did everything I could with the budget I had and the resources available, but still, there hasn't been a study. We want people to refute this or to confirm this. No one's done this study because the outcome is "breathe through your nose more often." There's no product and no money to be made at the end of it. But there's enough research that had been done at Stanford for 50 years—Christian Guilleminault, who is the Godfather of Sleep Medicine—that all of this was established. And now it's just about getting the word out to people and letting them know if you're snoring, if you're breathing through your mouth, if you have sleep apnea, that's causing a bunch of serious issues.

Jonathan: Before I move on. One thing that you mentioned that I think we haven't touched on is asthma. How does that fit into this story?

James: The vast majority of people with asthma are over-breathing. A large amount of them are breathing through their mouths. They have habituated themselves to be in this vicious cycle of breathing like this all the time. And when they hold their breath even for a few seconds, it sends alarm bells to their brains to make them breathe more. And so they breathe more, they get more nervous, they get more tense. What happens? An asthma attack. I was talking to Dr. Justin Feinstein, who has been studying this for a long time, and he looked at people who had panic disorders and asthma and found that the vast majority of them had an extremely low tolerance for carbon dioxide. So carbon dioxide is the end product of metabolism, and you're supposed to be able to tolerate a decent amount of it. Hold your breath for 30 seconds and feel comfortable because you need carbon dioxide in your bloodstream. Otherwise, it causes vasoconstriction and it causes a bunch of other issues. So many of these people are in this cycle of over-breathing, and the thought of holding their breath reminds them that they're having a panic attack. So they're just—I know this is a bit technical—they're constantly over-breathing. When you train asthmatics to breathe more slowly through the nose when they feel an asthma attack coming on instead of trying to overbreathe, to slow themselves down to hold their breath for a few seconds, it can be absolutely transformative. There are about 20 different studies looking into this that have found these people within a number of weeks are able to decrease the amount of bronchodilator use by around 50%, decrease oral steroids. And so many of them, they write me all the time, don't have any symptoms at all after a few months. To be completely clear, I would never say people should stop using their medication. Okay? Continue using your medication, but also it might be beneficial to seek out a qualified, certified respiratory therapist that can assist you in these different techniques to breathe more slowly. I have never heard of any asthmatic or people with anxiety or panic who have not had real benefits from learning how to breathe better. Now, that spectrum is wide. Some people say, "I do feel better. I'm using a little less medication." That's on one end. The other end is, "I have no more symptoms, and I'm so pissed off someone didn't tell me this 20 years ago."

Jonathan: I think there's a fascinating set of examples that you're pulling together here about our breathing. I'd love to talk about techniques that a listener could use to actually make a change, you know, ideally right now, so that if they were sitting opposite you right now, they'd be judged for their excellent breathing and not how they're getting it wrong. And maybe could we start with someone who's new to all of this? Like where should you start?

James: Okay. The first warning I'm going to give everyone is what I'm going to tell you is extremely boring. It's going to seem extremely mundane. A lot of people come up to me and they say, "You've studied this stuff for a while. You've talked to hundreds of experts. You've gone all over the world. Tell me the mystical knowledge behind proper breathing." And I'm here to tell you, it's nothing fancy, just like nutrition in many ways. It just doesn't need to be that complicated. So the very first thing is you have to become an obligate nasal breather. This doesn't mean every single breath you take needs to be in and out of the nose. I'm breathing through my mouth a bit now as I'm talking. You're laughing, you're breathing through your mouth. Sometimes when you're really exerting a lot of energy, you can. All of that is perfectly fine, but your habit, your default should be nasal breathing. It's hard for me to give advice on this because everyone is different and they suffer from slightly different things. So there are some people that have a structural problem in their noses and need to see a surgeon. There are some people who have problems with their nostrils. Here's a little trick. You may be one of them. You can take two fingers. For those of you listening and not driving, don't do this driving. You can take two fingers, your forefinger and your middle finger from both hands. Place them right next to your nose, right next to your nostrils, and pull your nostrils apart. Is it significantly easier to breathe that way? Is it for you?

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Jonathan: I think it's easier, maybe not a little bit easier.

James: Some people, their eyes just open up and they say, "Oh my God." Then there's a good chance you suffer from nasal valve collapse. Huge percentage of the population, like 20% of the population has this. So you can wear these little nasal strips, you can condition yourself to do that. You have to become somebody who your default is nasal breathing. This includes while you're walking. This includes while you're jogging, while you're doing most exercise, and it especially includes at night. And one of the ways you can do that at night—the ever-controversial mouth tape is coming up here, everybody get ready—is I was told by a respiratory therapist at Stanford to use a teeny little piece of tape across my lips. This is not a big fat strip of duct tape. This is a teeny little piece of tape to help train yourself to close your mouth at night, to become a nasal breather. It was extremely awkward for me the first couple of weeks. She told me this seven years ago. I remember two or three nights that I haven't worn that since because it made such an enormous difference to my sleep quality. If you don't believe me, you can track your sleep and see what it does for you if you are a mouth breather.

Jonathan: So, just to make sure I've understood that. I'm not putting tape across my whole mouth. I'm putting like a little bit from my top to the bottom just to sort of hold it together. But if I had to, I could still like breathe a bit through the side. I haven't blocked it completely, but it basically means I can't separate my upper and lower lip anymore.

James: This is one technique. There are several techniques. There are several products. I don't endorse any of them. I'm not affiliated with any of these different companies. I have found what works for me personally after experimenting wildly for a few weeks was a little piece of surgical tape. You can buy it at your local drugstore, and just using it about the size of a postage stamp, placing it at the center of your lips. And at any time it pops off, comes off at any time. This is not something that you want to feel claustrophobic or frustrated about. It's just a reminder to keep your mouth shut.

Jonathan: And you said this is controversial.

James: It's controversial because I think around 40% of people don't need it. So you hear a bunch of people saying, "Everyone benefits from sleep tape." That's garbage because they've done studies and found around 55 to 60% of the population re-open their mouths, but the other 40% doesn't. So if you are one of those people who sleeps with your mouth shut, you do not need mouth tape. And some people get really reckless with this stuff. They wear a huge strip of tape, they go out and drink at night, right? They wear it no matter what. Or they're extremely obese and suffer from extreme sleep apnea thinking that this little piece of tape is going to fix all their problems. So just use common sense and go slow. The protocol, if you were to follow one, is surgical tape. Mild adhesive, not something that leaves a sticky residue. Place it at the center of your mouth. Wear for 10 minutes answering emails, doing dishes, watching TV. Comfortable? Then wear it for 20 the next day. Still comfortable? Wear it for an hour the next day. Uncomfortable at any time? Stop wearing the tape. It's not right for you.

Jonathan: So you talked about default nasal breathing, and you now talked about how you were trying to breathe at night. Is there anything else that I need to be doing to breathe properly?

James: There is. So the other one is to breathe more slowly. This is a little easier. So once you become an obligate nasal breather, it kind of forces you to breathe more slowly. But it's also helpful to develop a more proper habit if you are to breathe through your nose. And just try this with me. We're just going to breathe in to a count of around five. Inhale, 2, 3, 4, 5. And exhale, 2, 3, 4, 5. Little softer. And inhale, 2, 3, 4, 5. And exhale, no movement in the shoulders, 2, 3, 4, 5. And inhale, flexing your stomach out, allowing that breath to fill in, and exhale. And now as you exhale, the stomach's coming back in a bit now. Inhaling, allowing your gut to sort of freely come out, and exhaling. Do you feel any different breathing that way?

Jonathan: I feel incredibly calm, really fast. I also feel that those are much slower breaths than I'm used to taking, maybe twice as long on each, but I really noticed a shift in just my mental state. It's, you know, it's quite stressful trying to do a podcast, make sure I'm doing a good job. And interestingly, I immediately felt, "Oh, obviously it's more relaxing now."

James: So if you were able to shift your nervous system to become more relaxed, clear your thoughts, get more oxygen in 20 seconds, we did that. Imagine if you had 20 hours of breathing this way, or 20 days, or 20 weeks, or 20 years. What would happen to even your metabolism, to your ability to sleep better, to your ability to function better? I'm not saying you need to be breathing this slowly all the time. This is a training exercise, right? So it's a bit extreme in how slow it is. But after breathing this way, if you do it for long enough, just a few minutes a day, your body slowly becomes habituated to become more comfortable breathing more slowly and more deeply. So maybe if you were breathing at 15 breaths a minute, after a few weeks or a few months, you might be breathing at 10 breaths a minute. That will make such an enormous difference throughout the day. The more conscious you become of it, the more you start doing it, the easier it is to become your unconscious default. So you don't want to go around thinking about breathing all day, who wants to do that? But if you train yourself, just like if you train yourself to eat better, that will become the thing that you default to when you're not thinking about it. And that's the key behind all this stuff. What I would suggest people do, if you're actually interested in doing this, set an alarm on your phone twice a day, maybe during your commute, if you're driving or if you're on the train or whatever. And just for five minutes, do this breathing exercise. There's an audio track. I'm happy to give it away for everyone for free, no paywalls or any of that. And you just have this on your phone. You just do it twice a day. That's not a big ask for five minutes. And they found that even that short amount of time can have downstream benefits to your stress levels, to your ability to become more comfortable breathing more slowly. And that's really what it's all about. By breathing more slowly, what you're really doing is breathing normally, because so many of us are over-breathing. My suggestion is just get down to normal. You don't have to be a super breather, just be normal.

Jonathan: That's amazing. Where would I find this breathing exercise?

James: I will send you the track. You can share it with everybody.

Jonathan: Okay. We will find a way to have a link in the show notes so you can get this exercise. That sounds fantastic. Thank you, James. Let's say that I'm listening to this, realize I'm a mouth breather, realize that I'm breathing too fast, and I work to try and fix it. I start doing those five-minute exercises that you're describing. I start to think about this. How quickly might I start to feel the benefits of working on this?

James: The good thing about these exercises is, as you just demonstrated, about 20 seconds you can feel the benefits. It's not like going on some crazy diet and you feel the benefits two months later. So after a few seconds, you usually get a hint that, "Oh, this might be important. Oh, I can down-regulate my nervous system by just taking a few breaths." As far as developing a new habit where you're doing it unconsciously, it totally depends who you are, where you are on that spectrum of breathing health, right? If you're somebody with extreme COPD who has asthma, who's been breathing dysfunctionally your whole life, it's going to take you a lot longer to get to that point. So it's difficult for me to answer that. For me, I thought I was a good breather. I was much more dysfunctional than I'd anticipated, so it was after a couple of months. But the breathing exercise, it's great. It is optional. The number one thing is that nasal breathing. Because your body, you do that, you're about 70% there because you're breathing more slowly, right? It forces you to breathe more slowly.

Jonathan: James, that's been fascinating. I'd like to do a quick summary, and correct me if I get anything wrong. So the number one thing I've taken away is I'm breathing wrong. Everyone else I know is breathing wrong. Part of that, it's a little bit like the story with our food, that we're now living in an environment which is very different from the environment we all grew up in. And so part of that is that, you know, I'm sitting in a chair all the time and I'm sort of hunched over, and therefore, as I breathe, I'm actually sort of just breathing with the top part of my body with my mouth, and then only into the top of my chest. And so I'm not really getting it down to the bottom of my torso. And so then I'm having to breathe a lot more, and this is telling my brain I'm stressed out, and this is all bad. But it's not only that. Interestingly, you're also saying that the sort of food we eat, particularly as like a young child where we just don't really need to chew our food, which has come up on other podcasts. A lot of that is also this like very processed food means that actually our mouths are not developing in the same way. And you're saying you can see that in the teeth of skeletons from the past, that we literally have like a smaller jaw, crumpled teeth. So that is also affecting the way that we breathe. Related to this is the way that so many of us are snoring. And snoring isn't just annoying for your partner, but actually it's a sign that you are struggling at night. But the biggest thing you're talking about is that we're all breathing through our mouth, and we should be breathing through our nose. And that has a number of reasons. You know, partly to do with maybe the sort of the protective elements of how it filters things out. It also just has this natural sort of brake on the pace at which I can breathe. So by breathing through my nose, I'm just going to slow it down. And we did this amazing experience for me where, you know, in 20 seconds I just felt calmer just from shifting to the nose and the slower breathing. And most people who know me know that I'm clearly a mouth breather all the time because I'm the least calm person you'll meet. This isn't just though about things like not snoring or feeling a bit calmer. You're talking about evidence that links this to, you know, really serious conditions like asthma. You have your own example about how this has impacted this big reduction in infections that you're getting in your chest. And so for you, as you think about like the actionable advice, the biggest thing is how can you move to a point where you are default breathing through your nose? Even if you're jogging, amazingly, you should be breathing through your nose, and especially at night. You believe that using mouth tape to adjust to nasal breathing can work, and you've seen lots of people use it. You made very clear that this is not a big piece of duct tape over my mouth. You're saying like a little bit of surgical tape, like postage stamp size across the top and bottom lip, and actually just slowly train yourself during the day, which is a way also to move towards the nose, and then you can try it at night. And then finally, just breathing more slowly in general with this better posture is going to put me in a much better place. I can train myself, although it should become automatic. If I can set an alarm for five minutes a day, do this breathing exercise—and we will make sure we have that and put a link on the show notes—you can not only practice that in those five minutes, but it will start to affect my unconscious pattern the rest of the time.

James: All true. Everything you've said there except for the fact that not everybody is breathing through the mouth. So a lot of us are habituated to be mouth breathers. But the rest of that, that was the best non-AI live human summary I've heard in a long time. So congratulations.