James Nestor: Learning How to Breathe
James Nestor is the author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. While Breath is a mega-bestseller—across the globe, it’s also an award-winning work of science reporting, stringing together seemingly disparate streams of thought and science into a treatise on one of the most significant impacts on our health: The way we learned to breathe. Yep, breathe. James makes the case that our tendency toward mouth-breathing works against our very nature, distorting our faces and jaws, ramping our anxiety, and weakening our immune response…simply because our noses are designed to filter the world on our behalf. I loved our long-ranging conversation, and it was wonderful to be in James’s company again. Let’s get to our chat.
MORE FROM JAMES NESTOR:
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves
James’s Website
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I'm excited to talk to you again. The last time I spoke to you was either before or as your book was coming into the world, and I still see it in every airport in America, so congratulations.
JAMES NESTOR:
Thank you. I've seen it in a few airport. It's always a little surreal. I don't see anyone reading it in airports, but I assume they're just reading on Kindle. Right? That's a safe assumption.
ELISE:
Or listening to it in the audio version.
JAMES:
You know what, I didn't think about that. Thanks for comforting my insecurity.
ELISE:
I guess that's the moment when, you know, you haven't made as a writer. When you are sitting next to someone on a plane who's reading your book, is that the sign that you're waiting for?
JAMES:
You know, it's happened to me once and I was so curious if this person was enjoying it or learning anything, but then I thought, what if they really hated it? That would really ruin my day. So, you know, sometimes it's best just to leave nature to its own course and that's it. I can't imagine that people just lug around hard covers, though. I mean, it's enviable and, and respectful that you're lugging around this two pound hardcover thing when you could just have it on your phone. So, I think that's a trend that's starting to come back up. I guess people want other people to see what they're reading, which is fine. Just, be careful about your book choices, though.
ELISE:
Yeah, I read physical books. I'm a weirdo. I take notes and I am already on my phone so much that I appreciate the opportunity to put it down.
JAMES:
I completely agree with you. I'm a big fan of ink on paper, but when I'm traveling I'm a big fan of not having a bunch of crap in my man purse. So I have never traveled with a hard cover, but maybe after this conversation, it's time to do that.
ELISE:
It increase your VO2 max.
JAMES:
Didn't know that, okay <laughs>. I'll let you know what it is in a month or two.
ELISE:
Can't wait for it to make it into your next book, but really, I mean, it's funny because breath belongs to all of us, right? And then the statistic that you offered is that 90% of us are breathing incorrectly. Do you think that that percentage has gone down since Breath was published?
JAMES:
I'd love to say that, that I was responsible for changing the breathing habits of humans around the world, of course that's not the case. I think what we can really attribute the awareness to breathing to is this little thing called COVID, which came out exactly at the same time that my book released within a couple weeks. And I think that made people, once you lose the ability to breathe, you're like, oh my God, maybe this thing breathing is kind of important. Maybe I should pay attention to it. And I think that's what is stirring all the interest in breathing and breathing health.
ELISE:
Yeah, that's a, obviously a great point, everyone I know tapes their mouths shut, which I still can't bring myself to do because of you and your book and that health intervention in my family, I have an ALF appliance expander for my palette that I sleep with every night. My son has an appliance expander in his mouth, top and bottom. It's too big for me to mouth tape, but maybe that's next for me, James <laugh>.
JAMES:
By right, you are expanding your airway and you're not a chronic mouth breather, then I don't see a reason to use sleep tape. I don't think everyone needs to use sleep tape. So yeah, I think if you breathe through your mouth at night, it's something you might want to consider. But if you are not a mouth breather at night, why would you use tape? You don't need it. I'm talking to, you know, 65% of the population that are mouth breathers at night. I found it to be incredibly beneficial, it's the one thing I've heard more than anything else about the book. I mean, thousands and thousands of people everywhere. Every time I do a speaking gig, people come up to me, like, oh, that mouth tape really change my lives. So, for a lot of people, it's great. For some people it doesn't do anything. And for those who don't need it, why would you use it?
ELISE:
Yeah, I probably do need it. I just can't handle all of these interventions at the same time.
JAMES:
Yeah. It's just too much stuff. I get what you're saying. Get ready. You know, once your expansion is over, then you can kind of figure out whether or not you need it. I will say, when I was doing that palatal expansion for the book and for my airway health, I really needed it because this even opened my mouth up even more than it was opened before. So I found it to be very beneficial. But man, is it a pain in the butt to put that thing in your mouth and then put tape on your mouth? I mean, you just imagine if there's a fire or something, you go to try to call 911, you've got a little, little work to do, you know?
ELISE:
It's very sexy. I've learned from my husband, my nightly ritual.
JAMES:
You know, I think in some bondage circles it might be, we could check in about that. I have not heard of such circles, but I guarantee you they're out there <laugh>.
ELISE:
Just a little myo tape, alpha appliance circle. No, but I just am really grateful to you, for your guidance during that period, because I think maybe right before I had interviewed you, I had interviewed Rafael Paleyo at the Stanford Sleep Institute and we were talking about my oldest son and I was explaining his restless leg syndrome and some of his attention issues and other things that were going on, migraines. And he was like, you need to have him tested for a sleep disorder. And I realized he has a tight tongue. He has a tiny pallet. His jaw is out of place. I mean, all of this stuff probably seems obvious, but it's kind of not often when you're a parent. He was diagnosed with multiple sleep disorders, although I think really they're just a function what's happening with his mouth. And so now, I mean, it's pretty dramatic, we're still mid process, but, it's been an incredible intervention for him and for his sleep and his ability to focus. And similarly for me, with my migraine disorder and my palate, when my dentist puts his hands in my mouth to expand my palate, it immediately drops me into a parasympathetic state. But the first time he did it, I almost cried from relief. It's interesting how much anxiety I think can be held in the mouth and how much better I feel the wider my palate gets.
JAMES:
Yeah. And what's interesting about all this is people may say, oh, it's a placebo effect or whatever, but this is basic biology. If you're struggling to breathe, struggling to do anything 20,000 times a day, 25,000 times a day, what's gonna happen to your body? What's gonna happen to your anxiety levels and your stress levels? So to me, it's very simple. It's binary. And what you experienced is just you, and so much of the population has a smaller pallet. It's a smaller airway, probably has airway issues just like everyone else I know. So by opening up your pallet and opening up your your airway, you're gonna breathe easier. And obviously that's gonna relax you. So I, I think that this is such common sense that everyone can, can acknowledge that, you know, that in that sequence of events, at the end of it, you will be better. And which is exactly what happens. I can't tell you how many hundreds of case studies I've seen from Dennis, like Raphael and Kevin Boyd and who are just like, this is before and after sleep apnea, no sleep apnea, anxiety, no anxiety, ADHD, bedwetting at the age 12, and none of that afterwards. Cause oftentimes a lot of those things are sleep issues and they’re airway issues.
ELISE:
Yeah, it's true. And when looking at Max, the way that his sleep disorder showed up, it's not that he's an incredibly heavy sleeper, it's that he doesn't get into a proper REM cycle. He's so disturbed throughout the night that he's not REM cycling. It was a really interesting experience to see the effects of that.
JAMES:
Yeah, I just think that it's absolutely so odd and quite depressing that you've had to learn this yourself by doing your own investigations and that no other doctors were looking at his breathing or my breathing or anyone else's breathing, you know? They're so easy to prescribe things without knowing the core issue. And so often, not all the time, but so often it's related to sleep disordered breathing. And, you know, if anything happens in the next few years, I hope that this is something that will be better acknowledged and better treated. Because so many kids are suffering from this and they have no idea why they're suffering from so many other symptoms.
ELISE:
No, totally. And as you write, you spend a lot of time in the book talking about orthodontia and sort of the traditional practice, which is pulling teeth, right? And how instead of expanding the jaw, we're making our mouth even smaller and that the expansion was seen as quackery, right? Or just odd?
JAMES:
Well, what's what's interesting about that is yeah, and I've gotten some pushback from dentists, who called me a quack. But what's interesting is the very first orthodontics, before we were putting people in braces and extracting teeth, was expansion. This is what was done in the 1860s, and this is what was done for decades and decades and decades. One thing I learned from dental historians is that it was only until the 1940s where so many people had crooked teeth, they needed to find a production line way of fixing people's teeth without completely ignoring the airway. Right? How do we fix a bunch of people's teeth? How do we make their teeth straight and braces and extractions work really good to make your teeth straight at the cost of your face and at the cost of your airway. And this would've been so controversial 20 years ago when people were saying it, and they were, dentists were saying this, and now I have a strange work life. I speak at a lot of dental conferences and I always expect people to come up and completely eviscerate me afterwards. And I'm ready for that. And I have my research, it just isn't happening. So I think that they've known this a long time and they needed someone who wasn't a dentist to tell them this, which is odd because I have no license, they can revoke. Right? I'm an author, so I can say whatever I want. What I'm saying is based on all of the facts that I've found over several years.
ELISE:
Yeah. And in the book too, you trace the roots of this, right? So, the fact that through a number of circumstances, when you look at more ancient skulls, you don't see this crowding and crookedness. Right? So can you take us through the evolutions in modern life that have netted us this result?
JAMES:
Sure. So this is a little depressing, but there's a happy ending. Don't worry. So what happened was, when we, all of our ancestors, ancient ancestors had straight teeth, okay? All of them. And we never needed to have wisdom teeth extracted. Could you imagine a species that needed to extract their wisdom teeth at 17 or 18 years of age? It just never happened. That's not how we were designed. Only until around 300, 400 years ago, depending on where you were, were we starting to see these wide incidences of crooked teeth and those incidences of crooked teeth came right in line with the introduction of industrial foods. So you could see it within a single generation, 50% of a population would have crooked teeth from having perfectly straight teeth to crooked teeth. Two generations later, about 70% of the population, three generations later, about 85% of of the population, four generations later, you know, look around, that's us. It's 90 plus percent of the population. So this is not some hair brain hypothesis. It's been proven out for decades and decades and decades. They've done pig studies, they've looked at humans in the same family and in the same village and in the same counties who had been introduced industrialized food versus those who are eating their traditional diets. And the same story played out every single place. So it has nothing to do with genetics when people say, oh, my teeth are crooked because it's, you know, a genetic predisposition. It's garbage. It has to do with the fact that we changed our diet to very soft foods. And that's it, that's the reality, you can argue anything else you want around this, but it's not true. This is what I'm telling you, is what has been clearly documented, whole books written about it.
ELISE:
So yeah, we just stopped gnawing on things, essentially working those masseter jaws.
JAMES:
Yeah. And that's it essentially, you know, minerals, vitamins do make a difference if you don't have enough vitamin D, right? Your bones grow very soft. Same with K2. You need that as well. But nothing is more powerful than the masticatory stress, especially early in life. So it starts right in infancy, you can look at kids who have been breastfed versus those who have been bottle fed. They will grow different profiles and the kids who have been bottle fed will have a higher incidence of snoring and sleep apnea later on in life. I get ridiculed every time I talk about breastfeeding and bottle feeding. I wanna be super clear, I'm not judging anyone for anything, right? I know how difficult it is is to live in the modern world. So there's zero judgment here. I'm just offering up facts that I learned from experts in the field. And after weaning from breastfeeding, it's essential to go onto chewing regular foods. Our ancestors did not eat gerbers. They didn't eat processed carrots or apple sauce. They ate meat, they ate hard foods. And so there's a whole movement called baby led weaning, which is just about weaning kids onto regular hard foods. And all that masticatory stress builds proper muscles, it builds proper bones, it builds proper airway. I did not get any of that growing up. So I am like many people in my generation where I was just, you know, bottle fed and then I was just weaned onto soft foods and then I ate soft foods basically up until now. Even healthy foods are soft, so just very little chewing.
ELISE:
Yeah, certainly. And you talk about, I think you were talking about maybe it was Plains Indians, how those mothers, those parents would actively—was it more of an immune response or can you tell us a little bit about the defensive nature of breathing through the nose and why indigenous tribes, how they intuitively understood that and would close mouse of kids to teach them to breathe through their noses?
JAMES:
So we know so little about what Native American cultures were like pre-contact because nobody was really going out there. Or if they were going out there, they were going out to trade. They weren't going out to record any of the culture, any of the habits, what they did to heal themselves. But George Catlin did. And he traveled more miles than Lewis and Clark and he went all around to 50 different Native American cultures. And he found that they all had straight teeth, right? They all had these big wide pronafic faces. Many of them were seven feet tall. They were the tallest cultures ever to have been found on earth as Native Americans. And they understood and acknowledged and appreciated breathing as a medicine. This was not something they did flippantly. And they taught everyone to breathe from the moment they were born. So infants were trained to nasal breathe. They were even put on boards so that it would be very hard to mouth breathe at night. And they believed that this allowed them to grow this very handsome or structured profile. It also allowed them to breathe better. And we can't prove that there will never be a randomized control trial of putting babies on boards versus not putting babies on boards. But we can look at the skeletal record and find these people had gorgeous teeth. They had huge airways, huge sinus cavities. And from that we can infer that they had significantly fewer breathing respiratory issues than we deal with today.
ELISE:
And can you talk a little bit about the protective nature of the nasal passages in terms of when we breathe through our noses, how that can be protective or not? I'm not sure where the science is.
JAMES:
Yeah. So it's basic biology. If you were just to look at a cross section of a human skull, what you would see is that if you take a breath through your mouth, there's nothing in the way of that breath, right? So this unprocessed, unconditioned, unfiltered air just goes directly into our lungs. That's how long it takes to take a huge breath of air. But if you were to breathe through the nose, takes a longer time. It takes much more effort. And that is because you're forcing that air through all of these different structures, these different terminates past all the Celia, which are these little hairlike articles in our noses that grab onto allergens and dust and breathing through the nose helps protect our bodies against bacteria, against viruses, and more. So it's not only the structures and all of those tissues, it is also the fact that we release six times more nitric oxide when we breathe through the nose. And that nitric oxide helps kill viruses and bacteria. So our nose is a way of purifying the error around us, just the same way a Brita would purify the water from a tap. Our nose does the same thing. And so, especially in this time where there's so many viruses, so much bacteria and so many allergens and smog and pollution around, the fact that you wouldn't be breathing primarily through your nose is kind of crazy cause it's really our first line of defense.
ELISE:
Yeah, and then you talk a fair amount about our tendency, besides that gasping, that open mouth, which I am definitely guilty of, but this over-breathing and I'm a chronic hyper-ventilator, too. But this lack of a full exhale. And how common is it, do you think, that most of us are above capacity or holding too much breath in our lungs without fully exercising the circle?
JAMES:
It's hard to tell on that. If you look at chronic hyperventilation, I've seen stats from 20% of the population to significantly fewer than that. So we don't really know. So few people study this. If you look at the inability to get a full exhale and how many people are breathing dysfunctionally in that regard? I think it's the vast majority of the population. You know, I stated that 90% of us are suffering from some sort of respiratory dysfunction. I say that at the beginning of the book. I've learned that it is probably closer to 95% of us. It is so rare that somebody breathes normally. And that's the one correction that a lot of scientists wanted me to make. They're just like, you are being way too soft on humanity. So we're all thoroughly messed up whether or not we snore or have asthma, chronic sinusitis, mouth breath. But this thing about this inefficient breathing is something that affects basically everyone. You could think that athletes like, oh, these are the most fit people in the world. They know how to breathe. No, they know how to push through the pain, but many of them are severely dysfunctional breathers. I know this cause I know many elite coaches who work with Olympians and navy seals and UFC fighters and they said these people, their breathing is a disaster. So an exercise that you can do, breathing in is easy, right? You just breathe in. But so many of us will just continue breathing and especially when we're stressed packing air on top of air, on top of air, which is not efficient. So if we want to get a really efficient breath of air, we have to first exhale all that stale air. And in order to do that, we have to lift that diaphragm up. So a lot of us are conditioned to have that diaphragm in this down position and just pack in air. But the real key, and the yogis knew this and the ancient Chinese knew this, was to learn how to truly relax and deflate and to let that air out. And it takes a long time to get this, get this trick. And there's many different exercises you can do to practice this, but it's essential for efficient breathing.
ELISE:
Yeah. And that's to really, really focus on that exhale until you're truly empty, right? To the point where you call it a sub whisper.
JAMES:
This is one trick that a breathing therapist who's actually a choral conductor that went and rehabbed Emphysemics who were left for dead, hundreds and hundreds of them, no one knew what to do with these guys. They were laid out on gurneys, had a steady diet of antibiotics and pumped full of oxygen. But this guy went in, Carl, and taught them how to exhale. That's his intervention. That was his prescription. Learn how to exhale and then he will learn how to inhale and he breathe properly. So an exercise he had them do was to take in a breath through the nose and count from one to 10 as fast as they could, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And when they were out of breath, to keep going , to sub whisper, happy you brought up that word until you're completely out of breath. So don't overdo it. Okay? So many of us, when we learn something new, we wanna overdo it and do this a million times. You have to slowly acclimate that muscle, that diaphragm into that position. But I found that practices really, really useful. There's some other towel practices, there's some yoga practices that really help you exhale as well. And those are beneficial too.
ELISE:
Yeah. I've had this conversation with so many friends who don't understand that what they are doing is actually chronic hyperventilation. Cause we think of hyperventilation and we think of breathing into a bag and being in a panic attack. But chronic hyperventilation, which I do, which I can do for months at a time, every afternoon, particularly when I'm sleep deprived and or stressed, is over breathing. It's this, right? So it's, but it's a mix up in my brain and it's a mix up between the brain and the body where I think I don't have enough oxygen because I can no longer take a deep breath because my lungs are oversaturated. And so anyone who has experienced this, where you hit that point where you're like, I can't breathe, and then it obviously triggers you to breathe more and then you're yawning to get deep breaths. I think it's actually quite common. I think you said 20%, just when I have friends who complained to me and I'm like, oh, you know what that is? And they're like, no, I have no idea what that is. I just think I'm dying.
JAMES:
I really think that the best thing that you can do is just to really train yourself to nasal breathe as often as you can. And until it becomes an unconscious habit, then you don't have to think about it because your mouth is just closed all the time. It's helpful. It was helpful for me at the beginning to put a little piece of tape on my mouth while I was sitting in front of a computer at work and to just leave it there just so I could train myself to breathe through my nose. Another thing that's helpful is to, once you acknowledge that feeling is coming on, to take control of it and to force yourself to breathe more slowly, five seconds in, five seconds out is a good one. That physiological sigh, which is two breaths in and then just let it out and do about five rounds of those to reset your respiration. And I think that once you become aware of it, you can then intervene and help to fix it. Another thing, if you notice that this is coming on at the same time of day, is to set timers on your phone every 15 minutes, every 20 minutes, every half an hour, whatever you want. And just when that one ring comes off, it's like, okay, I'm gonna check in on my breathing right now. Am I breathing through my mouth? Am I breathing too much? And I'm just gonna reset, take a couple breaths in and just relax.
That's gonna reset your respiration. So you can start with that. This doesn't work for everybody, but there are no negative side effects of this. It's only gonna help you. It might help a little bit or it might help significantly to help reset that hyperventilation. What you were talking about is what so many other people talk about. It's this chemo receptive sensitivity to co2. And the more tolerant you get of slow breathing, the more co2, the calm you will get. And this is where all the science and breathing, not all of it, but a lot of it is heading right now, is this tolerance for co2, which is why breath holding activities are very, very helpful for chronic hyperventilation and panic.
ELISE:
Talk about co2 because I don't know if they still use it, but wasn't it a common intervention on firetrucks, et cetera? Like this is old, right? Having a tank of co2.
JAMES:
So co2 is that that trigger to breathe, so right now, if you were to exhale and you just wait and you feel that need to breathe building up, that is not dictated by oxygen, okay? It has nothing to do with the lack of oxygen in your body. It's dictated by an increase of carbon dioxide. So when that increase of carbon dioxide hits a certain level, it triggers that need to breathe. But what happens is when people are over breathing so much that trigger, that co2 trigger, goes lower and lower and lower, the threshold gets so low that even holding your breath for five seconds, 10 seconds at a time, people have chronic hyperventilation or panic, they go right, because they're so sensitive to co2, has nothing to do with oxygen. Which is why I would suggest people who have chronic hyperventilation syndrome or panic, to get a pulse oximeter. Don't believe me, believe the data coming off of your finger. And you will see your oxygen levels are just fine, right? What you're doing is responding to that rising level of co2. So scientists knew this more than a hundred years ago. They used co2, a combination of co2 and oxygen, it's extremely effective for hyperventilation, it was effective for asthma. It was hyper effective for stroke, smoke inhalation and more. They also started using it for anxiety and panic. And what they did is they would give people this big dose of co2, which mimicked a very long breath hold. So if you hold your breath for a very long time, your co2 levels are gonna go way up, right? A lot of people don't want to do that. So that they would just put on a gas mask and shoot them up with co2, make them inhale this big bolus of co2, which would allow that threshold of co2 to rise up a little more. It's like, you know, endurance training. It's like weight lifting. And lo and behold, this was so effective for anxiety and panic and now it's coming back. The NIH is funding new studies in co2 therapy and it's been working wonderfully because of course it is because we already knew this. So if you don't want to inhale co2, breath holding is such a powerful thing thing especially.
ELISE:
So what what will be the application of co2, like an inhaler of co2?
JAMES:
They're doing that right now, it's not an inhaler. You have to go down to the lab and then you take this big bolus, this big inhale of co2 and usually do that one or two times and then you leave and people say, my god, their anxiety is over <laugh>. Not for everyone, but it's, according to some scientists, it works better than any other intervention period because where the science is leading us right now is several researchers believe that anxiety, panic, these are not mental conditions. It's a physiological problem tied to chemo receptor sensitivity. And if this is true, it's gonna explain why SSRIs really don't work that good for anxiety and panic. Why so many of these other tranquilizers don't seem to do much because they're affecting the wrong thing. But the thing we need to be looking at is co2. And this is also a why breath holding is part of every ancient breathing system that there is from ancient Chinese Chiang to pranayama to ancient yoga systems all across the world, people were focusing on holding the breath.
ELISE:
Right, and was the story of Rama, the ability to affect the autonomic nervous system. And can you talk a little bit about, I mean that's what's so amazing, and obviously people have heard about monks who can raise their body temperature, however many degrees sort of spontaneously, our ability to control these things that we think are beyond our control has been shown. But can you tell us about Rama and what he was able to do?
JAMES:
Sure. So none of us will ever get to this level of breathing fitness. I actually don't know of anyone on the planet well anymore since the advent of cell phones and computers and Facebook and all the rest. But this is when people were able to study for decades in a cable alone study, the process of breathing and meditation. And one person who really was good at it was Swami Rama. And this is somebody who grew up in the Himalayas, you know, was meditating at the age of four, did his time in a cave alone, I think it was five years, and then went out and showed the world what he could do because a lot of scientists said this is complete garbage. But he was able, in a lab setting with a navy physicist measuring everything on his body, he was able to change the temperature in his hand, 11 degrees from one side of the hand to the other. So he took conscious control of his blood vessels and he could make one side of his hand gray and the other very, very red and rosy with fresh blood. He was able to trigger his heart rate beat at 300 beats per minute. That's 3 0 0. With under his conscious control, he was able to turn that on and turn it off. According to some reports, he was able to move a metal needle across the room that was on a compass hand, crazy stuff. But you can read the, the reports yourself. This was published, this was big news back in the seventies, right? It was published in the New York Times Magazine, so it was all verified, and yet Swami Rama came and went, and people still think this stuff is impossible. So he was not only able to take control of his nervous system, but he was able to take control of other processes and systems within his body to do impossible things. It turns out that we can all take control of our nervous systems. This is supposed to be impossible, but we can do it with this thing called breathing. And this isn't some, big claim. It's science and this is what was discovered about six years ago with studies with Wim Hoff, we can take control of aspects of our immune function and our nervous system by breathing.
ELISE:
Yeah, I love Wim Hoff, he’s one for the ages too. And, for people who don't know his work, it's primarily cold exposure therapy. But the stuff that he has subjected himself to and the work that he's done in the lab, fighting off viruses is amazing.
JAMES:
Yeah, I mean, they shot him up with the endotoxin version of e coli. He breathes himself to a state where he suffers no symptoms. And then people said, well, you're just weird. He said, okay, give me any group of people, I'll show them to do the same thing. He spent four days with this group of people, randomly controlled trial, right? Totally randomized. And every single one of that was in his group was able to breathe this way and fight off the symptoms of e coli, the endotoxin version of e coli. All of the controls suffered from severe symptoms, vomiting, headaches, sweating. So he just proved that anyone with with a gumption can do this. And the great thing is you don't need to sign up for some four week course, you know, to learn this. It's available to everyone everywhere. It's free, it's cold exposure, it's free. You can take a cold shower for basically free. You can learn how to breathe like this. He calls it Wim Hoff method. It's a thousand year old technique called Teo. You can learn how to do that for free. You just have to want to do it and put in the time. And from what I see, a lot of people in our society don't want to do it, which is fine, there's no blame game here, but it's available to you.
ELISE:
Why do you think that people like Rama can come and demonstrate a lot of these interventions, and it's good to know that CO2 is potentially back, but is it just because it's so much easier to give someone something to take than it is to train people to live a little differently?
JAMES:
I think so. And because a lot of these things I'm talking about, a lot of people just aren't gonna do them, right? And again, I'm not blaming anyone, but for some of these more intensive things, it's how do you keep someone inspired to do this stuff? Doctors, they're not responsible for that, but they wanna help people out. So prescriptions work, like pills really work. They're great bandaids for a lot of chronic conditions, but they're not dealing with the core issue. So what I try to do in my work is say, hey, you know, this isn't the only thing you can do. You can continue taking pills and they work great, but I think people should have a choice at least, when a patient comes in, you have a choice. It's like, hey, your blood pressure's up. You can drastically change your diet and exercise or you can take the pills, both of them work. You can also try breathing. That works as well. When someone comes in with anxiety or panic, you know, here are the two things that you can do. There's a choice. How many people will take that other choice? That requires a lot more effort? I don't know, probably not that many, but they should at least be given that knowledge in order to choose the path they want to take to heal themselves.
ELISE:
Yeah, and it's funny too, my dad's actually a pulmonologist, but this idea that you want you want a doctor, I mean, I think we can all relate to this, you want some sort of complicated explanation for what's happening to you. You want, in some ways, complexity, right? So going to a doctor and having them tell you to engage in proper breathing is dissatisfying, I think, for a lot of us, right? Even though it's a blessing in its own way, but there's part of us that seeks complex answers to problems that feel complex to us. And so it's somehow maybe disappointing to be told, drink more water, learn how to breathe, eat whole foods.
JAMES:
Yeah. You're a hundred, a hundred percent right? I mean, look at how we've convoluted and complicated the most simple things. Look at nutrition now. How many supplements are we supposed to take? How many grams of fat am I supposed to eat? And then grams of carbs, and then how many grams of sugar? It's insane that we've managed because I think a lot of people don't believe stuff unless it sounds scientific or it's extremely complicated. But nature isn't that complicated. Like why do all of these cultures, the few that are around now, indigenous cultures, they don't have high blood pressure, they don't have heart disease, they don't have diabetes, they don't have anxiety, they don't have panic, they all have straight teeth. They don't also have any big pharma. They don't have dentists, they don't need any of this stuff because they are living in an environment in which humans naturally evolved.
You and I are not, we're living in an environment that is so different and it's no coincidence that the more we integrate back into nature, the better we get. Whether or not that's eating natural whole foods, whether that's walking 10,000 steps a day, which is about the average that indigenous populations walk, whether that's we start breathing through our nose, which is what we were designed to do. All of these things, it's very, very simple. We've created these diseases. They're diseases of civilization and when we remove all of these layers of civilization from us, our body enters a state of healing. So breathing ties into that, diet ties into that, exercise ties into it.
ELISE:
I know that you don't have a tape preference. Do you now have a preference on which tape people should use? And then I would say my tape is helpful for those, if you feel like you're gonna have a panic response to taping your mouth shut because it just sort of binds the corners and lets you theoretically open your lips.
JAMES:
So I don't care what tape people use, all I will say is that don't use duct tape. Don't use scotch tape. Don't use masking tape. Those are bad. I know they're probably around the house in the garage. Do not use those. Don't go on YouTube. There's just complete garbage on YouTube about this. What I have found, what works for me, I'm not saying this is gonna work for everybody, but after going through about 30 different types of tape, I found that surgical micropore tape, which you can get at Walgreens or on Amazon or your local indie pharmacy, this is tape that is made to be put on skin and taken off. So it has a very mild adhesive. I take a little piece of that and then I remove even more of the adhesive and I put it on my lips. The point with this tape is it's supposed to be able to come right off very easily without any effort. So if you are struggling to get the tape off, you are doing this all wrong. And if you wanna use myo tape, which as you explained is a tape that goes around the mouth, not over it, it works great for some people. Kids love it, parents love it because they don't wanna put tape on their kid's mouth. That works great too. So a lot of this is experimentation. I have no preference because everyone's different and everyone has different things that, that they like or don't like about certain tapes.
ELISE:
Yeah. In the years, I guess two years, two and a half years, but obviously you wrote this book in advance of when it came out, et cetera. What has evolved or changed or what have you learned on the road as you've been talking about this book for a long time?
JAMES:
Well, the first thing is something I mentioned a little bit, that we are going through a huge title shift in dentistry right now. So all the stuff that you and I had to weather, braces, all the headgear, that will not be around in 10 years, I am convinced of it. It's happening, it's happening now. It's been happening for a long time. But now the tide has finally turned and it's because parents are coming in. They're like, I don't want my kids' mouth smaller. I don't wanna extract teeth. I don't wanna ruin their profile. And Dennis listened to that. So I think that's, that's one thing that this concept has gone from being way on the outside to starting to become mainstream. Like half the talks I do, I do a lot of talks, are at dental conferences, ADA dental conferences.
It's bizarre. Beyond that, I think the other thing is awareness around sleep disorder breathing, especially for kids. And I get these letters almost every day. I was getting 10, 20 of them every single day of people saying, my kid has been sick for a decade, my kid has been sick for five years, no one has ever even mentioned breathing. They go in, they convince the kid to become a nasal breather. Their sleep improves, their conditions are reduced or sometimes disappear completely. I get these all the time. And these parents, they're happy for their kid, but they're also so completely pissed off that they had to read this in a book and have to get this advice elsewhere. So that's another thing. I see a lot of awareness around sleep disorder, breathing, not only for kids, but for adults as well. And I think that that's so, so positive.
And I guess the, the last thing is, did not predict this. And I, again, I think this had very little to do with my book and much more to do with the general awareness around breathing is there's all these studios now that are just breathing studios, right? And they have cold exposure as well. There's many in LA and San Diego where people come in and do this very intense breathing. They used to just call that yoga, but now it's called, you know, breath awareness, but it's all the same thing. I think it's great, you know, if people are getting something out of that, I certainly get so much out of that. I think that generally it's this awareness that breathing is not only important to health, but it can also help with athletic performance. It can help reach heightened mental states. It can help put you to sleep. All of these other things.
ELISE:
Are you so tired of talking about people's breathing?
JAMES:
You know, sometimes I am, but every time I get going, I'd be honest with you, I get a little more activated. I think I've gotten a little activated during this, during our interview here, because I'm passionate about the subject. I learned a lot researching the book, but it's mostly from hearing stories of people over and over and over again, the same stories that really puts a little skip in my step and makes me want to keep going. That's not to say, you know, in two years from now, I'm gonna still be talking about this stuff. Hopefully the word will be out. And I'm working on a new book anyway, so sort of going from one world to the other, but I still get pumped up about it, there's still so much to learn. I'm learning as I'm going along and people are teaching me. And that's just a wonderful thing.
ELISE:
I'm excited for your next book. This people often a ghost written so many books and have my own coming out and people are often ask me about writing books and I'm like, it better be something. Well, hopefully in the best case scenario, right? It's something that you get to, that you want to both think about intensively for a number of years and write about and then that you wanna talk about for as long as you can. Cause it's what, breath is gonna be your life for decade?
JAMES:
<laugh>. No, don't tell me that. I don't think it will be my life. I will be able to pop in and out of it. And, again, I would be honest, I'm just not sick of it yet. And when I am, I will not be doing these interviews. I promise you, because you know, you can see someone just phoning it in from a mile away. And I certainly hear that on some interviews and I'm like, Ugh, can't listen to this. So I'll let you know when that happens, when I'm like, no more interviews. You'll get the message. But as far as, you know, writing books and that process, I can't imagine writing a book that doesn't completely consume you. It's like, I'm sure you know this as well, writing a book is not just, I'm gonna clock in for eight hours and be done with it. You're thinking about it all day long. I do most of my best work right before I go to sleep, which is why I have a notepad by my bed. And that hypnagogic state where everything sort of comes into a very clear picture all suddenly at once. So it's a 24/7 situation, and that's why I wait a very long time until I find a subject that really inspires me that I wanna spend years and years researching and then a few years talking about. So, you know, I think it's fascinating that I'm not saying there's anything wrong about like, history as a Lincoln and stuff, but you'd have to be like so into Lincoln if you're spending five years writing about Honest Abe, and maybe some people are, but, you know, I am not as far as historical figures, I want to be within a place within looking at science that can be measured, right? And replicated over and over that can maybe help me and possibly help other people. So I think I just sound like such a jerk for all those Lincoln biographers. I did not mean it that way. <laugh>.
ELISE:
People are very passionate about Lincoln.
JAMES:
You know, on the New York Times bestseller, every single week for the past 50 years, there's a book about Lincoln. So damn, not only are people passionate about writing these books, people will reading them. So keep reading those Lincoln books. Maybe it's gonna be Lincoln Breath is coming out, breathe like Abe, you know? I hope that wasn't disrespectful. I'm just saying find something that you are passionate about because you can be stuck with it for a long time.
ELISE:
No, it's true. And if you're not, if you're not already passionate about it, you will be, it's consuming.
JAMES:
Unless it's a subject you aren't passionate about, then I think you will regret every life choice you've ever made that has led you up to writing that book about, you know, whatever, get fit in 50 steps, or whatever.
ELISE:
Oh, well it's always a pleasure.
JAMES:
<laugh>You're gonna leave it like that? Oh man. Hopefully this editor's just gonna cut off the last five minutes.
ELISE:
He finds a good poignant moment, always.
JAMES:
With a good poetic, soft landing man. Sorry about that.
ELISE:
I think it's important cause I don't think people don't understand, not to gripe, but sometimes people will ask me, they'll talk about wanting to, this is typically people who are experts, authorities in their field, and I'm like, but you don't read, so if you don't like reading, you should not write a book. It is so intense. I don't think anyone understands. It seems very simple when it's done right. The effect is effortless.
JAMES:
Yeah. But, but as you know, when people phone it in and halfass it, which so many books are, they're just, I mean, the books don't do anything. And there's, there's, you can tell there's no passion from the person writing it. So you can write books like that and you can probably get them published, but people will see right through it, you know, if you've put in the time and effort to do it. Which is why even with someone who's writing historical books on, not only Lincoln, but George Washington, you know, on Adams, now that I'm thinking about it, they must be passionate about it enough to wake up every morning and to write 600 pages, you know, about these historical figures. And then that's what they should be doing, right? Yeah. That's their calling in life. And that's a beautiful thing.
ELISE:
Well, I'm excited for your next book.
JAMES:
Okay. I'm excited for yours as well. Thanks for having me on.
ELISE:
Well, James makes me laugh and I am, as mentioned, incredibly grateful to him both for the book and his guidance as I’ve navigated through this, and it’s nothing that you can’t already find in the book, ultimately, but working through my own breathing issues, my migraines and my pallet, and helping Max as well, his book was an essential guide. And as we also mentioned, Raphael at Stanford, when I had first spoken to him and explained what was happening, I feel like what he said, effectively, that he thinks in time, most ADHD will be connected back to sleep, which is a pretty profound idea, particularly if the intervention is through helping everyone else breathe better. And throughout Breath, there’s tons of amazing storytelling and really interesting historical examples of people who have done pretty incredible things, simply by changing the way that they breathe. Highly, highly recommend it. There’s lots of interventions in there as well, and experts you can go to, like the Buteyko Breathing Method. Alright, I’ll see you next time.
