30 KiB
- Breath_ The New Science of a Lost Art - James Nestor
- Learn the Five Tibetan Rites. Get the book
- Lungs capacity are the greatests indicator of life span
- Most of the weight is lost through breathing as CO2
- Prayer is regulated breathing. Again how tradition is distilled knowledge
- 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
- Notes for page (19 . 21670)
- Notes for page (20 . 12780)
- Notes for page (22 . 18579)
Breath_ The New Science of a Lost Art - James Nestor
Learn the Five Tibetan Rites. Get the book
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
- 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.
Lungs capacity are the greatests indicator of life span
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.
Most of the weight is lost through breathing as CO2
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.
Prayer is regulated breathing. Again how tradition is distilled knowledge
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.
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
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.
Notes for page (19 . 21670)
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!”
Notes for page (20 . 12780)
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.
Notes for page (22 . 18579)
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.