Summary
- Breathing trough the nose
- Chewing
Evolution doesn’t always mean progress, Evans told me. It means change. And life can change for better or worse. 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. This concept, called dysevolution, (Location 345)
The plugged-up monkeys developed the same downward growth pattern, the same narrowing of the dental arch, crooked teeth, and gaping mouth. (Location 539)
Part Two THE LOST ART AND SCIENCE OF BREATHING (Location 640)
Three NOSE (Location 643)
The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness. (Location 707)
Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect: it works as a kind of brake system to the right nostril’s accelerator. The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers temperature and blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety. (Location 711)
There’s a yoga practice dedicated to manipulating the body’s functions with forced breathing through the nostrils. It’s called nadi shodhana—in Sanskrit, nadi means “channel” and shodhana means “purification”—or, more commonly, alternate nostril breathing. (Location 721)
The specialist advised that the only way to open her nose was through surgery or medications. She tried mouth taping instead. (Location 846)
Like other parts of the body, the nasal cavity responds to whatever inputs it receives. When the nose is denied regular use, it will atrophy. (Location 852)
unless we’ve got the lung capacity to hold in that air. Just a few minutes of daily bending and breathing can expand lung capacity. With that extra capacity we can expand our lives. The stretches, called the Five Tibetan Rites, (Location 884)
Inhaling was the easy part. The key to breathing, lung expansion, and the long life that came with it was on the other end of respiration. It was in the transformative power of a full exhalation. (Location 969)
Emphysema, he realized, was a disease of exhalation. The patients were suffering not because they couldn’t get fresh air into their lungs, but because they couldn’t get enough stale air out. (Location 993)
After several rounds of deep breaths to open my rib cage, 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.” (Location 1042)
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. (Location 1191)
For a healthy body, overbreathing or inhaling pure oxygen would have no benefit, no effect on oxygen delivery to our tissues and organs, and could actually create a state of oxygen deficiency, leading to relative suffocation. (Location 1221)
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. (Location 1236)
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. (Location 1271)
“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?” (Location 1284)
“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.” (Location 1286)
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, Taoist, and Native American prayers: 5.5 breaths a minute. (Location 1309)
It turned out that the most efficient 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. (Location 1318)
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,” (Location 1321)
we’ve also become a culture of overbreathers. Most of us breathe too much, and up to a quarter of the modern population suffers from more serious chronic overbreathing. The fix is easy: breathe less. (Location 1346)
“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. We’ll then continue the same short inhales while lengthening the exhales to a five, six, and seven count as the run progresses. (Location 1385)
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.* (Location 1494)
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. (Location 1522)
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. (Location 1556)
When we breathe too much, we expel too much carbon dioxide, and our blood pH rises to become more alkaline; when we breathe slower and hold in more carbon dioxide, pH lowers and blood becomes more acidic. Almost all cellular functions in the body take place at a blood pH of 7.4, our sweet spot between alkaline and acid. (Location 1587)
themselves with nothing more than breathing less. The techniques they used varied, but all circled around the same premise: to extend the length of time between inhalations and exhalations. The less one breathes, the more one absorbs the warming touch of respiratory efficiency—and the further a body can go. (Location 1608)
all these pulmonauts discovered the same thing. They discovered that the optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters. The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales. This is the perfect breath. (Location 1618)
Seven CHEW (Location 1623)
But the changes triggered by the rapid industrialization of farmed foods were severely damaging. Within just a few generations of eating this stuff, modern humans became the worst breathers in Homo history, the worst breathers in the animal kingdom. (Location 1658)
Researchers have suspected that industrialized food was shrinking our mouths and destroying our breathing for as long as we’ve been eating this way. (Location 1743)
Price became convinced that the cause of our shrinking mouths and obstructed airways was deficiencies not of just D or C but all essential vitamins. Vitamins and minerals, he discovered, work in symbiosis; one needs the others to be effective. This explained why supplements could be useless unless they’re in the presence of other supplements. (Location 1768)
The problem had less to do with what we were eating than how we ate it. Chewing. It was the constant stress of chewing that was lacking from our diets—not vitamin A, B, C, or D. (Location 1783)
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. (Location 1787)
Breathing slow, less, and exhaling deeply, I realized, none of it would really matter unless we were able to get those breaths through our noses, down our throats, and into the lungs. But our caved-in faces and too-small mouths had become obstacles to that clear path. (Location 1797)
This condition is so common that researchers have an official name for it, “nasal valve collapse,” and an official measurement, called the Cottle’s maneuver. It involves placing an index finger on the side of one or both nostrils and gently pulling each cheek outward, lightly spreading the nostrils open. If doing this improves the ease of nasal inhales, there’s a chance that the nostrils are too small or thin. (Location 1816)
In a strange twist, he found that the devices invented to fix crooked teeth caused by too-small mouths were making mouths smaller and breathing worse. (Location 1918)
Chewing. The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe. (Location 2024)
Part Three BREATHING+ (Location 2087)
Eventually, a Harvard Medical School researcher named Herbert Benson thought it might be time to put Tummo to the test. (Location 2265)
Note: How to practise tummo
That would change by the early 2000s, when a Dutch man named Wim Hof ran a half-marathon through the snow above the Arctic Circle shirtless and in bare feet. (Location 2273)
(Tummo) This practice of heavy breathing along with regular cold exposure was later discovered to release the stress hormones adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine on command. (Location 2296)
The Grofs called it Holotropic Breathwork, from the Greek holos, which means “whole,” and trepein, which translates to “progressing toward something.” (Location 2396)
It took some doing. Holotropic Breathwork often included a journey through “the dark night of the soul,” where patients would experience a “painful confrontation” with themselves. (Location 2398)
Nine HOLD IT (Location 2459)
The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu spiritual text written around 2,000 years ago, translated the breathing practice of pranayama to mean “trance induced by stopping all breathing.” (Location 2548)
Meuret crunched the data and found that panic, like asthma, is usually preceded by an increase in breathing volume and rate and a decrease in carbon dioxide. To stop the attack before it struck, subjects breathed slower and less, increasing their carbon dioxide. (Location 2636)
Ten FAST, SLOW, AND NOT AT ALL (Location 2726)
you’ll see the word prana, which translates to “life force” or “vital energy.” Prana is, basically, an ancient theory of atoms. The concrete in your driveway, clothes on your body, spouse clanking dishes in your kitchen—they’re all made of swirling atomic bits. It’s energy. It’s prana. (Location 2763)
Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity. (Location 2857)
The key to Sudarshan Kriya, Tummo, or any other breathing practice rooted in ancient yoga is to learn to be patient, maintain flexibility, and slowly absorb what breathing has to offer. My initial experience with Sudarshan Kriya may have been a bit jarring, DeRose says, but it also convinced me of the sheer power of breathing. In the end, it’s what brought me here. (Location 2946)
Nine out of ten of the top killers, such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke are caused by the food we eat, water we drink, houses we live in, and offices we work in. They are diseases humanity created. (Location 3017)
of that stuff was already soft and overly processed. Your diet should consist of the rougher, rawer, and heartier foods our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers ate. (Location 3078)
The kinds of foods that required an hour or two a day of hard chewing. And in the meantime, lips together, teeth slightly touching, and tongue on the roof of the mouth. (Location 3079)