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+* Breath_ The New Science of a Lost Art - James Nestor
+:PROPERTIES:
+:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/James Nestor/Breath_ The New Science of a Lost Art (11274)/Breath_ The New Science of a Lost Art - James Nestor.epub
+:END:
+** Learn the Five Tibetan Rites. Get the book
+:PROPERTIES:
+:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 1613)
+:END:
+#+BEGIN_QUOTE
+The path to everlasting life involves a lot of stretching: back bends, neck bends, and twirling, each
+one a holy and ancient practice that had been passed down in secrecy from one Buddhist monk to
+another for 2,500 years. Olsson and I need this stretching; even if we breathe through the nose
+twenty-four hours a day, it won’t help much 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, came to the Western world, and to me, by way of
+writer Peter Kelder, who was  known as a lover of “books and libraries, words and poetry.”
+
+ In the 1930s, Kelder was sitting on a park bench in southern California when an elderly stranger
+struck up a conversation. The man, whom he called Colonel Bradford, had spent decades in India
+with the British Army. The Colonel was old—all sloping shoulders, gray hair, and wobbly
+legs—but he believed there was a cure for aging and that it was locked up in a monastery in the
+Himalayas. The usual mystical stuff occurred up there: the sick became healthy, poor became rich,
+old became young. Kelder and the Colonel stayed in touch and shared many conversations. Then,
+one day, the old man hobbled away, desperate to find this Shangri-La before he drew his last
+breath.
+
+Four years passed until Kelder received a call from his building’s doorman. The Colonel was
+waiting downstairs. He looked 20 years younger. He was standing straight, his face vibrant and
+alive, and his once-balding head was covered in thick, dark hair. He’d found the monastery,
+studied the ancient manuscripts, and learned restorative practices from the monks. He’d reversed
+aging through nothing more than stretching and breathing.
+
+Kelder described these techniques in a slim booklet titled The Eye of Revelation, published in
+1939. Few people bothered to read it; fewer believed it. Kelder’s yarn was likely fabricated, or at
+minimum grossly exaggerated. However, the  lung-expanding stretches he described are rooted in
+actual exercises that date back to 500 BCE. Tibetans had used these methods for millennia to
+improve physical fitness, mental health, cardiovascular function, and, of course,  extend life.
+
+#+END_QUOTE
+** Lungs capacity are the greatests indicator of life span
+:PROPERTIES:
+:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 2844)
+:END:
+#+BEGIN_QUOTE
+More recently, science has begun measuring what the ancient Tibetans understood intuitively. In
+the 1980s, researchers with the Framingham Study, a 70-year longitudinal research program
+focused on heart disease, attempted to find out if lung size really did correlate to longevity. They 
+gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the
+greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had
+suspected. It was lung capacity.
+
+The smaller and less efficient lungs became, the quicker subjects got sick and died. The cause of
+deterioration didn’t matter. Smaller meant shorter. But larger lungs equaled longer lives.
+
+Our ability to breathe full breaths was,  according to the researchers, “literally a measure of living
+capacity.” In 2000, University of Buffalo researchers ran a similar study,  comparing lung capacity
+in a group of more than a thousand subjects over three decades. The  results were the same.
+#+END_QUOTE
+** Most of the weight is lost through breathing as CO2
+:PROPERTIES:
+:NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 10607)
+:END:
+#+BEGIN_QUOTE
+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.
+#+END_QUOTE
+** Prayer is regulated breathing. Again how tradition is distilled knowledge
+:PROPERTIES:
+:NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 29082)
+:END:
+#+BEGIN_QUOTE
+A last word on slow breathing. It goes by another name: prayer.
+
+When Buddhist monks chant their most popular mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, each spoken
+phrase lasts six seconds, with six seconds to inhale before the chant starts again. The traditional
+chant of Om, the “sacred sound of the universe” used in Jainism and other traditions, takes six
+seconds to sing, with a pause of about six seconds to inhale.
+
+The sa ta na ma chant, one of the best-known techniques in Kundalini yoga, also takes six seconds
+to vocalize, followed by six seconds to inhale. Then there were the ancient Hindu hand and tongue
+poses called mudras. A technique called khechari, intended to help boost physical and spiritual
+health and overcome disease, involves placing the tongue above the soft palate so that it’s pointed
+toward the nasal cavity. The deep, slow breaths taken during this khechari each take six seconds. 
+Japanese, African, Hawaiian, Native American, Buddhist, Taoist, Christian—these cultures and
+religions all had somehow developed the same prayer techniques, requiring the same breathing
+patterns. And they all likely benefited from the same calming effect.
+
+In 2001, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy gathered two dozen subjects, covered them
+with sensors to measure blood flow, heart  rate, and nervous system feedback, then had them recite
+a Buddhist mantra as well as the original Latin version of the rosary, the Catholic prayer cycle of
+the  Ave Maria, which is repeated half by a priest and half by the congregation. They were stunned
+to find that the average number of breaths for each cycle was “almost exactly” identical, just a bit
+quicker than the pace of the Hindu, Taoist, and Native American prayers: 5.5 breaths a minute.
+
+But what was even more stunning was what breathing like this did to the subjects. Whenever they
+followed this slow breathing pattern, blood flow to the brain increased and the systems in the body
+entered  a state of coherence, when the functions of heart, circulation, and nervous system are
+coordinated to  peak efficiency. The moment the subjects returned to spontaneous breathing or
+talking, their hearts would beat a little more erratically, and the integration of these systems would
+slowly fall apart. A few more slow and relaxed breaths, and it would return again.
+
+A decade after the Pavia tests, two renowned professors and doctors in New York, Patricia
+Gerbarg and Richard Brown, used the same breathing pattern on patients with anxiety and
+depression, minus the praying. Some of these patients had trouble breathing slowly, so Gerbarg
+and Brown recommended they start with an easier rhythm of three-second inhales with at least
+the same length exhale. As the patients got more comfortable, they breathed in and breathed out
+longer.
+
+It turned out that the most 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.
+
+The  results were profound, even when practiced for just five to ten minutes a day. “I have seen
+patients transformed by adopting regular breathing practices,” said Brown. He and Gerbarg even
+used this slow  breathing technique to restore the lungs of 9/11 survivors who suffered from a
+chronic and painful cough caused by the debris, a horrendous condition called ground-glass
+lungs. There was no known cure for this ailment, and yet after just two months, patients achieved
+a significant improvement by simply learning to practice a few rounds of slow breathing a day.
+
+Gerbarg and Brown would write books and publish several scientific articles about the restorative
+power of the slow breathing, which would become known as “resonant breathing” or Coherent
+Breathing. The technique  required no real effort, time, or thoughtfulness. And we could do it
+anywhere, at any time. “It’s totally private,” wrote Gerbarg. “ Nobody knows you’re doing it.”
+
+In many ways, this resonant breathing offered the same benefits as meditation for people who
+didn’t want to meditate. Or yoga for people who didn’t like to get off the couch. It offered the
+healing touch of prayer for people who weren’t religious.
+
+Did it matter if we breathed at a rate of six or five seconds, or were a half second off? It did not, as
+long as the breaths  were in the range of 5.5.
+
+“We believe that the rosary may have partly evolved because it synchronized with the inherent
+cardiovascular (Mayer) rhythms, and thus gave a feeling of wellbeing, and perhaps an increased
+responsiveness to the religious message,” the Pavia researchers wrote. In other words, the
+meditations, Ave Marias, and dozens of other prayers that had been developed over the past
+several thousand years weren’t all baseless.
+
+Prayer heals, especially when it’s practiced at 5.5 breaths a minute.
+
+#+END_QUOTE
+** Over-breathing leads to kidney buffering, which tries to balance blood pH by release bicarbonate into the bloodstream, taking with it minerals needed in cells
+:PROPERTIES:
+:NOTER_PAGE: (16 . 35363)
+:END:
+#+BEGIN_QUOTE
+Packman explained that overbreathing can have other, deeper effects on the body beyond just lung
+function and constricted airways. 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.
+
+When we stray from that, the body will do whatever it can to get us back there. The kidneys, for
+instance, will respond to overbreathing by “buffering,”* a process in which an alkaline compound
+called bicarbonate is released into the urine. With less bicarbonate in the blood, the pH lowers back
+to normal, even if we continue to huff and puff. It’s as if nothing ever happened.
+
+The problem with buffering is that it’s meant as a temporary fix, not a permanent solution.  Weeks,
+months, or years of overbreathing, and this constant kidney (renal) buffering will deplete the body
+of essential minerals. This occurs because as bicarbonate leaves the body, it takes magnesium,
+phosphorus, potassium, and more with it. Without healthy stores  of these minerals, nothing works
+right: nerves malfunction, smooth muscles spasm, and cells can’t efficiently create energy.
+Breathing  becomes even more difficult. This is one reason why asthmatics and other people with
+chronic respiratory problems are prescribed supplements like magnesium to  stave off further
+attacks.
+
+Constant buffering also weakens the bones, which try to compensate by dissolving their mineral
+stores back into the bloodstream. (Yes, it’s possible to overbreathe yourself into osteoporosis and
+increased risk of bone fractures.) This unending grind of imbalances and compensations, of
+deficiencies and strain, will eventually break the body down.
+
+Packman was quick to point out that not all respiratory illness sufferers and other sick people have
+a carbon dioxide deficiency problem. Those with emphysema, for instance, may have dangerously
+high levels of carbon dioxide because they’ve got too much stale air trapped inside. Others may
+test with completely normal blood gas and pH levels. But such nitpicking, he said, missed the
+larger point.
+
+All these people have a breathing problem. They’re stressed, they’re inflamed, they’re congested,
+and they struggle to get air in and out of their lungs. And it’s these breathing problems that slow,
+paced, less techniques are so effective at fixing.
+#+END_QUOTE
+** Notes for page (19 . 21670)
+:PROPERTIES:
+:NOTER_PAGE: (19 . 21670)
+:END:
+#+BEGIN_QUOTE
+That shove is still perplexing to the few scientists paying close attention to such phenomena. They
+ask: How exactly can conscious extreme breathing hack into the autonomic nervous system?
+
+Dr. Stephen Porges, a scientist and professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, has
+studied the nervous system and its response to stress for the past 30 years.  His primary focus is the
+vagus nerve, a meandering network within the system that connects to all the major internal
+organs. The vagus nerve is the power lever; it’s what turns organs on and off in response to stress.
+
+ When perceived stress level is very high, the vagus nerve slows heart rate, circulation, and organ
+functions. This is how our reptilian and mammalian ancestors evolved the ability to “play dead”
+hundreds of millions of years ago, to conserve energy and deflect aggression when under attack by
+predators. Reptiles still access this ability, as do many mammals. (Imagine the limp body of a
+mouse in the jaws of a house cat.)
+
+People “play dead,” too, because we share the same mechanisms in the primitive part of our brain
+stem. We  call it fainting. Our tendency to faint is controlled by the vagal system, specifically how
+sensitive we are to perceived danger. Some people are so anxious and oversensitive that their
+vagus nerves will cause them to faint at the smallest things, like seeing a spider, hearing bad news,
+or looking at blood.
+
+Most of us aren’t that sensitive. It’s much more common, especially in the modern world, to never
+experience full-blown, life-threatening stress, but to never fully relax either. We’ll spend our days
+half-asleep and nights half-awake, lolling in a gray zone of half-anxiety. When we do, the vagus
+nerve stays half-stimulated.
+
+During these times, the organs throughout the body won’t be “shut down,” but will instead be
+half supported in a state of suspended animation: blood flow will decrease and communication
+between the organs and the brain will become choppy, like a conversation through a staticky
+phone line. Our bodies can persist like this for a while; they can keep us alive, but they can’t keep
+us healthy.
+
+Porges found that patients who suffer Da Costa–like maladies such as tingling in their fingers,
+chronic diarrhea, rapid heart rate, diabetes, and erectile dysfunction are often treated for each of
+these symptoms with a focus on individual organs. But there’s nothing wrong with their
+stomachs, hearts, or genitals. What they often suffer from are communication problems along the
+vagal and autonomic network, brought on by chronic stress. To some researchers, it’s no
+coincidence that eight of the  top ten most common cancers affect  organs cut off from normal blood
+flow during extended states of stress.
+
+Fixing the autonomic nervous system can effectively cure or  lessen these symptoms. In the past
+decade, surgeons have implanted electrical nodes in patients that work as an artificial vagal nerve
+to restart blood flow and communication between organs. The procedure is called vagus nerve
+stimulation, and it’s highly effective for patients suffering from anxiety, depression, and
+autoimmune diseases.
+
+But there is another,  less invasive way Porges found to stimulate the vagus nerve: breathing.
+
+Breathing is an autonomic function we can consciously control. While we can’t simply decide
+when to slow or  speed up our heart or digestion, or to move blood from one organ to another, we
+can choose how and  when to breathe.  Willing ourselves to breathe slowly will open up
+communication along the vagal network and relax us into a parasympathetic state.
+
+Breathing really fast and heavy on purpose flips the vagal response the other way, shoving us into
+a stressed state. It teaches us to  consciously access the autonomic nervous system and control it, to
+turn on heavy stress specifically so that we can turn it off and spend the rest of our days and
+nights relaxing and restoring,  feeding and breeding.
+
+“You are not the passenger,” McGee keeps yelling at me. “You are the pilot!”
+#+END_QUOTE
+** Notes for page (20 . 12780)
+:PROPERTIES:
+:NOTER_PAGE: (20 . 12780)
+:END:
+#+BEGIN_QUOTE
+As far back as the first century BCE, inhabitants of what is now India described a system of
+conscious apnea, which they claimed restored health and ensured long life. 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.” A few centuries after that,
+Chinese scholars wrote several volumes detailing the art of breathholding. One text, A Book on
+Breath by the Master Great Nothing of Sung-Shan,  offered this advice:
+
+ Lie down every day, pacify your mind, cut off thoughts and block the breath. Close your fists,
+ inhale through your nose, and exhale through your mouth. Do not let the breathing be audible.
+ Let it be most subtle and fine. When the breath is full, block it. The blocking (of the breath) will
+ make the soles of your feet perspire. Count one hundred times “one and two.” After blocking
+ the breath to the  extreme, exhale it subtly. Inhale a little more and block (the breath) again. If
+ (you feel) hot, exhale with “Ho.” If (you feel) cold, blow the breath out and exhale it with (the
+ sound) “Ch’ui.” If you can breathe (like this) and count to one thousand (when blocking), then
+ you will need neither grains nor medicine.
+
+Today, breathholding is associated almost entirely with disease. “Don’t hold your breath,” the
+adage goes. Denying our bodies a consistent flow of oxygen, we’ve been told, is bad. For the most
+part, this is sound advice.
+#+END_QUOTE
+** Notes for page (22 . 18579)
+:PROPERTIES:
+:NOTER_PAGE: (22 . 18579)
+:END:
+#+BEGIN_QUOTE
+In a nutshell, this is what we’ve learned.
+
+SHUT YOUR MOUTH
+
+Two months after the Stanford experiment ended, Dr. Jayakar Nayak’s lab emailed Anders Olsson
+and me the results of our 20-day study. The major takeaway we already knew: mouthbreathing is
+terrible.
+
+After just 240 hours of breathing only through our mouths, catecholamine and stress-related
+hormones spiked, suggesting that our bodies were under physical and mental duress. A
+diphtheroid Corynebacterium bug had also infested my nose. If I’d continued breathing only
+through my mouth for a few more days, it might have developed into a full-fledged sinus
+infection. All the while, my blood pressure was through the roof and my heart rate variability
+plummeted. Olsson’s data mirrored mine.
+
+By night, the constant flow of unpressurized, unfiltered air flowing in  and out of our gaping
+mouths collapsed the soft tissue in our throats to such an extent that we both began to experience
+persistent nocturnal suffocation. We snored. A few days later, we started choking on ourselves,
+suffering from bouts of sleep apnea. Had we continued breathing through our mouths, there’s a
+decent chance we both would have developed chronic snoring and obstructive sleep apnea, along
+with the hypertension and metabolic and cognitive problems that come with it.
+
+Not all of our measurements changed. Blood sugar levels weren’t affected. Cell counts in the blood
+and ionized calcium remained the same, as did most other blood markers.
+
+There were a few surprises. My lactate levels, a measure of anaerobic respiration, actually
+decreased with mouthbreathing, which suggested I was using more oxygen-burning aerobic
+energy. This was the opposite of what most fitness experts would have predicted. (Olsson’s lactate
+slightly increased.) I lost about two pounds, due most likely to exhaled water loss. But trust me on
+this: a post-holiday mouthbreathing diet is not recommended.
+
+The nagging fatigue, irritation, testiness, and anxiety. The horrid breath and constant bathroom
+breaks. The spaciness, stares, and stomachaches. It was awful.
+
+The human body has evolved to be able to breathe through two channels for a reason. It increases
+our chances of survival. Should the nose get obstructed, the mouth becomes a backup ventilation
+system. The few gasping breaths Stephen Curry takes before dunking a basketball, or a sick kid
+huffs when he has a fever, or you take in when you’re laughing with your friends—this temporary
+mouthbreathing will have no long-term effects on health.
+
+Chronic mouthbreathing is different. The body is not designed to process raw air for hours at a
+time, day or night. There is nothing normal about it.
+
+ BREATHE THROUGH YOUR NOSE
+
+The day Olsson and I removed the plugs and tape, our blood pressure dropped, carbon dioxide
+levels rose, and heart rates normalized. Snoring decreased 30-fold from the mouthbreathing
+phase, from several hours a night to a few minutes. Within two days, neither of us was snoring at
+all. The  bacterial infection in my nose quickly cleared up without treatment. Olsson and I had
+cured ourselves by breathing through our noses.
+
+Ann Kearney, the doctor of speech-language pathology at the Stanford Voice and Swallowing
+Center, was so impressed by our data and her own transformation overcoming congestion and
+mouthbreathing that, at this writing, she is putting together a two-year study with 500 subjects to
+research the effects of sleep tape on snoring and sleep apnea.
+
+The benefits of nasal breathing extended beyond the bedroom. I increased my performance on the
+stationary bike by about 10 percent. (Olsson had more modest gains, about 5 percent.) These
+results paled in comparison to the gains reported by sports training expert John Douillard, but I
+couldn’t imagine any athlete who wouldn’t want a 10 percent—or even a 1 percent—advantage
+over a competitor.
+
+On a more personal note, those first few nasal breaths after ten days of obstruction were so
+shimmering and rousing that I got a little teary-eyed. I thought about my interviews with all the
+empty nose syndrome sufferers who’d been told they were crazy, that they should just quit
+complaining and breathe through their mouths. I thought about kids who’d been told that chronic
+allergies and congestion were a part of childhood, and the adults who’d convinced themselves
+that choking every night was a natural part of growing old.
+
+I had felt their pain, and was lucky enough to breathe life on the other side. It’s something I’ll
+never forget, and will never, ever repeat.
+
+ EXHALE
+
+Carl Stough spent a half century reminding his students of how to get all the air out of our bodies
+so that we could take more in. He trained his clients to exhale longer and, in the process, do what
+had long been considered biologically impossible. Emphysemics reported almost total recovery from
+their incurable conditions, opera singers gained more resonance and tone in their voices,
+asthmatics no longer suffered from attacks, and Olympic sprinters went on to win gold medals.
+
+As basic as this sounds, full exhalations are seldom practiced. Most of us engage only a small
+fraction of our total lung capacity with each breath, requiring us to do more and get less. One of
+the first steps in healthy breathing is to extend these breaths, to move the diaphragm up and down
+a bit more, and to get air out of us before taking a new one in.
+
+“ The difference in breathing in the coordinated pattern and in an altered pattern is the difference
+between operating at peak efficiency and just getting along,” Stough wrote in the 1960s. “An
+engine does not have to be in tip-top condition to work, but it gives a better performance if it is.”
+
+CHEW
+
+The millions of ancient skeletons in the Paris quarries and hundreds of pre–Industrial Age skulls at
+the Morton Collection had three things in common: huge sinus cavities, strong jaws, and straight
+teeth. Almost all humans born before 300 years ago shared these traits because they chewed a lot.
+
+ The bones in the human face don’t stop growing in our 20s, unlike other bones in the body. They
+can expand and remodel into our 70s, and likely beyond. Which means we can influence the size
+and shape of our mouths and improve our ability to breathe at virtually any age.
+
+To do this, don’t follow the diet advice of eating what our great-grandmothers ate. Too much 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. 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.
+
+BREATHE MORE, ON OCCASION
+
+Since meeting Chuck McGee at that roadside park in the Sierras, I’ve been practicing Tummo with
+dozens of others from around the world on Monday nights. That’s when McGee hosts a free online
+session open to anyone who wants to “become the eye of the storm.”
+
+Overbreathing has gotten a bad rap in the past few decades, and rightfully so. Feeding the body
+more air than it needs is damaging for the lungs right down to the cellular level. Today, the
+majority of us breathe more than we should, without realizing it.
+
+Willing yourself to breathe heavily for a short, intense time, however, can be profoundly
+therapeutic. “It’s only through disruption that we can be normal again,” McGee told me. That’s
+what techniques like Tummo, Sudarshan Kriya, and vigorous pranayamas do. They stress the
+body on purpose, snapping it out of its funk so that it can properly function during the other 23½
+hours a day. Conscious heavy breathing teaches us to be the pilots of our autonomic nervous
+systems and our bodies, not the passengers.
+
+ HOLD YOUR BREATH
+
+Several months after experimenting with carbon dioxide therapy, I was at home reading the
+Sunday paper, flipping through the obituaries, and saw that Dr. Donald Klein had died. Klein
+was the psychiatrist who spent years studying the links between chemoreceptor flexibility, carbon
+dioxide, and anxieties. He was 90. It was Klein’s research that inspired Justin Feinstein to pursue
+the NIH-funded experiments in Tulsa.
+
+I wrote Feinstein with the news. He was crushed. He told me he’d been planning on reaching out
+to Klein in the coming weeks regarding what could be a “game-changing discovery.”
+
+It turns out that the amygdalae, those gooey nodes on the sides of our head that help govern
+perceptions of fear and emotions, also control aspects of our breathing. Patients with epilepsy who
+have had these brain areas stimulated with electrodes immediately cease breathing. The patients
+were totally unaware of it and didn’t seem to feel their carbon dioxide levels rising long after their
+breathing ceased.
+
+Communication between the chemoreceptors and amygdalae works both ways: these structures
+are constantly exchanging information and adjusting breathing every second of every minute of
+the day. If communication breaks down, havoc ensues.
+
+Feinstein believes that people with anxiety likely suffer from connection problems between these
+areas and could unwittingly be holding their breath throughout the day. Only when the body
+becomes overwhelmed by carbon dioxide would their chemoreceptors kick in and trigger an
+emergency signal to the brain to immediately get another breath. The patients would reflexively
+start fighting to breathe. They’d panic.
+
+Eventually their bodies adapt to avoid such unexpected attacks by staying in a state of alert, by
+constantly overbreathing in an effort to keep their carbon dioxide as low as possible.
+
+ “What anxious patients could be experiencing is a completely natural reaction—they’re reacting to
+an emergency in their bodies,” said Feinstein. “It could be that anxiety, at its root, isn’t a
+psychological problem at all.”
+
+This approach is all very theoretical, Feinstein warned, and needs to be rigorously tested, which is
+what he will do in the coming years. But if it’s true, it could explain why so many drugs don’t
+work for panic, anxiety, and other fear-based conditions, and how slow and steady breathing
+therapy does.
+
+HOW WE BREATHE MATTERS
+
+I’ve chatted with Anders Olsson every few weeks since we paid through the nose in the Stanford
+experiment. Our talks are never dull. “I have more energy and focus than ever in my life!” he told
+me, right after celebrating his 50th birthday. Olsson is a pulmonaut in the purest sense: self-taught
+and driven by a sense that we are missing something right in front of us, a truth basic and
+essential.
+
+Through all my travels and travails, there is one lesson, one equation, that I believe is at the root of
+so much health, happiness, and longevity. I’m a bit embarrassed to say it has taken me a decade to
+figure this out, and I realize how insignificant it might look on this page. But lest we forget, nature
+is simple but subtle.
+
+The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5
+breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air.
+
+You can practice this perfect breathing for a few minutes, or a few hours. There is no such thing as
+having too much peak efficiency in your body.
+
+Olsson told me he’s working on several more devices to help us  breathe at this rate—slowly and
+less. He’s finishing production on his BreathIQ, a portable device that measures nitric oxide, carbon
+dioxide, ammonia, and other chemicals in exhaled breath. Then there are other skunkworks to
+mimic the effects of perfect breathing: a carbon dioxide suit, a hat, and . . .
+
+Meanwhile, Google just released an app that pops up automatically when the words “breathing
+exercise” are searched. It trains visitors to inhale and exhale every 5.5 seconds. Down the street
+from my house is a startup called Spire, which created a device that tracks breath rate and alerts
+users every time respiration becomes too fast or disjointed. In the fitness industry, resistance masks
+and mouthpieces with names like Expand-a-Lung are all the rage.
+
+Before we know it, breathing slow, less, and through the nose with a big exhale will be big
+business, like so much else. But be aware that the stripped-down approach is as good as any. It
+requires no batteries, Wi-Fi, headgear, or smartphones. It costs nothing, takes little time and effort,
+and you can do it wherever you are, whenever you need. It’s a function our distant ancestors
+practiced since they crawled out of the sludge two and a half billion years ago, a technology our
+own species has been perfecting with only our lips, noses, and lungs for hundreds of thousands of
+years.
+
+Most days, I treat it like a stretch, something I do after a long time sitting or stressing to bring
+myself back to normal. When I need an extra boost, I come here, to this old Victorian house in the
+Haight-Ashbury, and sit beside this rattling window with the other Sudarshan Kriya breathers I
+first met ten years ago.
+#+END_QUOTE