through consciousness development you start to become aware of different layers in reality you can access wisdom confront the unknown courageously speak truth have enough integrity so that you can break the rules when it’s necessary in the service of a higher good to know that is to be human you need to be extremely passionate about what you do and if you’re passionate about what you do then this will infect others a lot of people are slaves of their fears and their patterns but it’s very important that you are free

and authentic if you have the ability to empty your mind and perceive then you can see actually it’s inside out start with yourself and then you will be more capable of looking at the outside world we have to really slow down and ask ourselves what are we doing here and what what responsibility we carry for future generations i am javel anachor and this is the awake origins podcast here to break down the misconceptions about success and happiness bringing you inspiration from awake leaders entrepreneurs and creators to empower

you to create your life from the inside out james nestor great to have you on the podcast i’ve been looking forward to our conversation i love what you created with your book breath i have it here and while reading your book i realized how important breath work has been for me in the last few years a couple of years ago i interviewed wim hof i think you might know him went off at his home in the netherlands and that for me around that period i started experimenting with breath work for myself and what followed was one of the most

profound experiences in my life throughout that breath work and it has become also a crucial part of what we do with origins in all our work and programs with leaders and entrepreneurs but what i love about your book is that it inspired me to bring it to the next level and change my way of the way i breathe throughout the normal day to integrate it into my normal life and well your book has been of course endorsed by people like joe rogan elizabeth gilbert wim off and has been inspiring many people i

believe it’s even now translated into 30 languages and my first question to you would be how does it feel to have written a book that can change the lives of people in such a direct and concrete way well i would love to accept that and say that i was the only one responsible for doing that but uh as a journalist and as a reporter i’m just a filter for information so i am lucky enough to have a job where i can go and interview some of the most interesting people in the world who are doing fascinating research and try

to put that puzzle together into a story so uh you know i do not do direct research into breathing that’s that’s not something that i even want to do because i want to remain objective throughout this process so that i can see the world clearly and then construe that to the reader having said all that the response to this book has been uh completely unexpected it’s been pretty overwhelming but to me the highest compliment is that it’s helped someone out with with their life to take something that is

free that we carry around with us all the time and to be able to focus that in order to enrich various aspects of your health so i think that that’s wonderful if people can get that out of this book um what inspired what ignited your interest in in breathing it wasn’t one thing in particular it was several things that happened over several years so i never thought i was going to be writing a book about breathing what a boring subject and even when i had the book idea where i thought that there was something

interesting in this my agent my editor said no no no this is a terrible idea so i just forgot about it and years passed and i kept finding things that just didn’t seem to add up i was able to get to know free divers who are able to control their breath so much so that they can hold their breath for seven eight minutes at a time and dive to depths below what scientists think is possible and then you see someone like wim hof who is able to tap into his immune function and is able to teach other people how to do

exactly what he’s doing wim always says he’s not special you know this is a simple technique that everyone can do and so when you start looking at breathing and you start looking at the physics of breathing and how breathing affects our physiology you realize it is so influential on every single aspect of our health and yet most of us completely ignore it so after several years of collecting all of these random stories i presented this to my agent and editor i said i really think there’s a book in here

and they said hmm okay let’s explore this a bit and then i went into the field and spent years and years writing and researching and trying to figure this story out yes so what what really made me wonder was well the impact of breathing is so big and we’ll come back later to this why is there relatively a little scientific interest or interest in this to increase the way we breathe and like you said i think in your book the missing pillar in health is breath why is this well that’s a question i kept asking

myself i said if all of this is real and we can see from scientific studies we can see from measurements measurements you take in your own body in real time how your breathing affects your brain how it affects your heart how it affects your circulation so there’s no debate about that it’s all very well known but i think so many of us think that our breathing is so simple it’s an unconscious act that it can’t really have such an influence over us it’s so obvious right it’s right in front of us the whole time

that i think we’re convinced that things need to be complicated in medicine now to really be effective i mean look at what’s happened to food oh you need the c vitamin you need this b12 vitamin you need this k2 vitamin you need this amount of protein like our ancestors never did this and they were perfectly healthy um so i think in the modern day were so convinced that in order for them things to work properly they have to be very elaborate but nature is simple first and foremost and that’s my best reasoning for why

this stuff has been so long ignored and i don’t have any other really good uh reason uh you know maybe there’s a better reason but i think it’s it’s that exactly that it’s just too obvious so when you say this stuff has been ignored for so long what is this stuff what are some of your most important findings and i i think that i was inaccurate in that phrasing there so in certain areas breathing has been studied in the scientific community for 50 years longer than that if you look at the research going on in russia in the 1950s

and even some of the research going on with carbon dioxide in the 1920s and 1910s and before that in the late 1800s but this research was done by scientists who had a hard time communicating with other communities in the medical uh communities so it’s even though the research is there even though this is so easy to measure it never seemed to get out to the general public it seemed to stay in academia what’s interesting though is that our ancient ancestors going back 5 000 years and on up from ancient china to ancient hindus

even the ancient greeks so they all knew that breathing was a medicine this is how they considered breathing as this vital medicine as important as the food we’re eating and so it’s just interesting that it’s we have this foundation this understanding and appreciation of breath for thousands and thousands of years we even have scientific studies proving how breath can so influence us on so many levels but it just didn’t seem to really get out to most people just that in the same way that nutrition information hasn’t really

gotten out to us until around 20 years ago i mean you should have seen the food i ate growing up i had no idea that that stuff was such garbage so it takes a while for this stuff to to really get to the general public in your in your book you write that the perfect breath is five and a half seconds in five and a half seconds out why is this and what happens when you breathe like that i think as a as a general rule that’s a very good starting place some people who are taller who have larger lungs

should breathe a little slower than that right but for most people this is a good place to start because throughout the day most of us tend to breathe too much we tend to breathe into our upper chest and when we’re breathing this way this is very inefficient for bringing oxygen into our bodies to feeding our hungry cells the reason is when you breathe these short breaths and too many breaths you’re just taking air into the very upper lobes of the lungs and then you’re exhaling it so all the air that’s taken into your mouth your

throat none of that participates in gas exchange so we only use about 50 percent of the air that we take in when we’re breathing this fast and this shallowly so by simply taking slower breaths lighter easier inhales deeper exhales we can increase our efficiency by about 35 so we get more oxygen for less effort which is why your heart rate tends to go down which is why your blood pressure goes down and the different systems of your body enter the state of what researchers call coherence so this is how the body wants to

function why do you want to put all this undue wear and tear on your body constantly throughout the day you should let it function naturally in a state of calm and that’s how you’re going to be able to perform better and even live longer so what happens with your body and your your mind when you’re in coherence so what happens is there is this big muscle it’s shaped like a parachute it’s called a diaphragm and it sits underneath your lungs you can think of the lungs like two fleshy balloons they can’t inflate and deflate on their

own right they need something to do that so we have this piston in our bodies this diaphragm that when we breathe in that diaphragm descends and when we exhale that diaphragm lifts up to push that air out so not only is this diaphragm functioning to allow ourselves to get air in and out of our bodies it also serves other functions that the diaphragm is connected through a nerve that’s connected directly to the brain and most of these nerves between the brain and the diaphragm through this phrenic nerve are coming

from the body to the brain so when you breathe slowly like this in this fluid fluid rhythmic light pattern you send messages to the brain to calm down so you can actually take control of your nervous system by just breathing a lot of us think that the brain is controlling everything in the body the brain needs inputs and signals the body in in which case for our breathing more of those signals are coming from the body from our breath to the brain than the other way around so this is the quickest way

to diffuse stress in a real measurable way it’s not just a placebo effect or subjective we can measure what happens so i’m wondering to what extent in your daily life have you been able to integrate this slow breathing are you for example doing it right now when you’re listening to me or how does that work well i you know people think that since i wrote a book about breathing that i’m now the best breather in the world and i’m you know wear wear a lot of robes and look at crystals and breathe all the

time that’s not my role as a journalist right i just went into the field and researched the top scientists who were studying breath and respiratory function and the top studies and other breathing therapies sure i picked up a few tricks along the way and once you see people so profoundly transformed by their breathing you can’t help but want to adopt some of these patterns so i’m conscious of my breathing throughout the day without a doubt but the point of developing healthy breathing habits isn’t so you become a neurotic like i

was writing this book it’s so you develop these skills that you don’t have to think about it right you’re just working on default your body naturally wants to do this that can take several weeks to several months to do so i think that most of the time i’m a good breather now i wear enough wearables to to show me my respiratory rate to show me my heart rate variability which gives me a view into my breathing but i also do some conscious breathing exercises in the morning i’m a big fan of this especially with such a stressful

job as i’ve had for the past year is to start off the morning with about 10 to 15 minutes of focused breathing exercises and then i do wim hof method a couple times a month i do um sudarshan kriya a few times a week and i try to stay up on that stuff as well so how has it impacted your life or your experience of life if you would give it words well i try to keep that out of my reporting because i don’t want people to think that my experience means that this is proof of anything or that just because this worked for me

in a certain way it’s going to work for everyone i don’t think that that’s an accurate description what i’ve done in this book and what i try to construe to people is look at the science when you have dozens and dozens of clinical trials showing that breathing can so effectively work to reduce symptoms of asthma even reverse it it can so effectively work for panic then that’s what’s convincing to me is data and real studies having said that yeah it’s completely transformed my life uh i used to suffer from chronic bouts of

mild pneumonia because i’m a surfer here in san francisco and bronchitis and wheezing even though i was eating all the right foods i was exercising all the time sleeping all the time i was still having respiratory issues and i’ve had none of those things i haven’t had a stuffy nose uh since i was sick about uh two years ago my nose got stuffed up for a couple days so and it used to be chronically stuffed up so again i want to be very clear that my experience will will be different from someone else’s

but look at the science and and look at how these simple techniques can really help um get rid of even allergies and and and mental health issues um just by adopting them and and breathing normally i mean we get most of our men our energy from our breath not from food from breath so if you think that how you’re taking in that breath and exhaling it isn’t going to affect you throughout the day it’s not going to affect your athletic performance your your crazy it has a huge impact on all those things

so and i know you don’t want to position yourself as the doctor or expert but if you would advise someone on where to start just a very small thing how can you start yeah and thank you for saying that i’m not a breathing therapist i’m not a doctor there’s doctors in my family lucky lucky for me because i bounced so much of this information off them before i even wrote about it but the very first thing i would suggest people doing is to breathe out of your nose as often as you can so i’m going to show you why

this is important i brought a guest here today um so if you look at the nose here and for people who are listening to this i’m holding up a cross section of a human skull and we’re looking at the nasal cavities and the mouth when you’re breathing air through the nose you’re forcing it through all of these different structures right uh where it passes through different hairs it passes through a mucous membrane and while air is passing through this it’s pressurized it’s heated up it’s moistened and it’s conditioned so

that by the time it gets to the lungs it’s purified in many ways so it’s treated so your lungs can absorb about 20 percent more oxygen breathing through the nose than equivalent breaths through the mouth and if you look at the mouth here there’s none of these structures that’s how long it takes for me to get a breath through the mouth and a lot of people think that’s good it’s more oxygen more quickly that’s not how the body works when you have this slight pressure right in the lungs you allow the lungs

to more easily and efficiently absorb oxygen which is why these slower breaths these longer breaths give you more oxygen than breathing like this so it really starts with the nose and i think if you can become a habitual nasal breather you’re about 70 to 75 there to become a healthy breather because the nose naturally slows down the air it monitors how much air is coming in and out of your body and it also helps defeat pathogens it helps to fight off viruses and bacteria it’s our first line of defense

and what i found very interesting is that you described it even when you’re doing uh sports or endurance sports that you can keep breathing through your nose while we’re of course all we’re used to breathing through our mouth as soon as we do a short run so this is possible it’s possible it’s not fun at the beginning so especially if you’re someone who’s who’s been and and it was awful for me when i first began so when we had a habit that habit can be very hard to shake right and if you’ve been breathing through your mouth

while you’re jogging for 30 years then it’s going to be hard to just default to nasal breathing for a number of reasons one it’s a mental it’s a psychological habit and for two is these structures of the nose here need conditioning just like any other structures of the body so you can’t go from just mouth breathing to entirely nasal breathing it’s not gonna work our noses are coated with different tissues and different cartilage and different structures that they need conditioning to open up and so

usually after a couple weeks people are like oh my god i never thought i’d be able to breathe through my nose so easily but it takes a few weeks or even a few months for elite athletes it can take up to six months to convert but once you convert performance goes up recovery times can be cut in half you feel way better and you operate at peak efficiency and we’ve seen this with various studies and literally hundreds and hundreds of case reports of trainers who have trained their elite athletes to become nasal breathers that’s not to

say you can’t at some times at peak states in zone four and zone five take a few breaths through your mouth right right before you’re about to reach a finish line maybe that’s advantageous but only when you’re using it as a tool only when you’re conscious of it so i was stunned by the advances you can make in athletic performance by just focusing on your breathing and it’s no coincidence that the top trainers in the world right now laird hamilton brian mckenzie patrick mcewen the very first thing they do

is train their athletes to breathe properly and the vast majority are breathing in a dysfunctional way so do you see a shift now happening in sports to yeah yeah it’s been happening for a long time it’s just a lot of trainers have been keeping the stuff secret this is their special sauce right this is what they want to become the real expert in but now the cat’s out of the bag and you you would be amazed by how many professional weight lifters how many wrestlers how many ultimate fighters how many runners

like breathing is is the thing right now and it should have been the thing long ago but if you look at the history of of athletics since the 1950s people have been using this but they’ve been very quiet about it and the teams that did use it they destroyed everybody they won more medals for their discipline be it track or be it swimming or be whatever than anyone else but they kept it their little secret and that is definitely starting to change now what i’m curious to um because i think the way you breathe

impacts your awareness your consciousness your state of being so when i slow my breathing down right now i can feel a little tiny subtle shift also in my calm like you’re describing what is happening with methods for example like the wim hof or something that i really like is we call it conscious connected breathing you do this for an hour and then you come into different states of consciousness you can through go through dark emotions that apparently were somewhere in your system with these kind of methods what

what is happening um within you so when i was talking about breathing slowly breathing calmly breathing light through your nose this is how you should be breathing most of the time but once you’ve gotten that down you can start exploring with other breath work and so in the last about third of the book i’m that that is what i get into it’s where else can breathing take us how can we use it to trigger different things in our brains and different things in our bodies and blood flow and hormones and all of that so

there’s a reason why the wim hof method is so similar to sudarshan kriya which is so similar to many pranayamas which is so similar to even holotropic breath work it’s because all of these systems purposely stress you out through your breath just as breath can calm the body down as you were just doing these slow breaths you increase blood flow to the brain your heart rate slows down you feel this calm because you’re tapping into your nervous system and reminding your body that you’re in a safe calm place you can also use breathing to

jack your body up and stress yourself out and a lot of people think why do i want to stress myself out i’m stressed throughout the day the point of these breathing techniques is to focus that stress into a very short amount of time and compound it so that the rest of the day you can be calm it’s like going to the gym and working out right you’re not going to stay in a gym for 24 hours a day that would destroy your body for the same reason you wouldn’t do wim hof method for 24 hours out of the day that would destroy you as

well but for a very short amount of time compounding this stress is like this pressure release valve for your body so you stress yourself out to calm yourself out and that’s what it allows you to do it allows you to consciously control stress you learn how to turn on stress specifically so that you can turn it off which is why wim hof method and sudarshan kriya and so many other breathing techniques have been found to be so effective for people with autoimmune diseases and people who have these

constant inflammatory markers in their bodies it helps to balance them out and those studies from those people i think are among the most fascinating it shows you just how powerful breathing can be i’ve been this was years ago but i’ve been experimenting with psychedelics and what it does with your experience and i found later that my most profound experience were not the psychedelics but with the breathing so it brought me into an even more pure and clear state of in which i in that spaciousness or in that

now moment i could feel just a connection with myself is what does science know about what is happening within your being within your mind when you bring yourself into that state with such methods of breathing we don’t know as much as we should and this is one thing that i found a little frustrating in in this world wim has volunteered to do any study anywhere which is what is so valuable about what he is putting out into the world we’re able to really tap into some of the functions of this heavy

breathing what’s really happening to the body so what what we do know is that you can produce these self-created opioids you can create a dopamine release you can create serotonin release so you can create all of these different neurotransmitters different hormones to make you feel incredibly good incredibly calm very enriched and light but what’s happening to the brain i think is among the most interesting of all of all the things that this heavy breathing can do for you and again i wish there was more science here

they’re starting to do a study um booting up a study at johns hopkins university which is one of the top medical institutions here in the u.s of of looking at exactly what’s happening to the brain but what we do know is when you breathe very heavy for a very long amount of time and you can try this if you’re listening to this podcast don’t do it while you’re driving but you can breathe like that and you’ll feel some dizziness in your head and maybe your fingers will start tingling that’s not from an increase of oxygen

okay it’s from a decrease of circulation and if you continue breathing this heavily you will continue to decrease your circulation to your brain and to your extremities in your body and through chronic over breathing you can decrease the blood flow to your brain by about 40 percent and so the current hypothesis is that this is such a reduction of blood flow to the brain that different circuits in the brain different areas start malfunctioning they start thinking that the body is dying and so this is one of the

reasons that they start releasing these different hormones these feel-good hormones and it’s also one of the reasons why people tend to have these re-birthing experiences these uh extremely enriching psychological breakthroughs so this is all hypothetical we don’t know for sure we do know about the blood flow and we do know when certain brain regions are cut off from having energy and oxygen they will start going on the fritz we know that and we also know that these sort of heavy breathing therapies

have been proven to be so effective with people with addictions with people with even schizophrenia and other mental disorders in which they’re hardwired into this negative feedback loop and what the psychologists and psychiatrists think may be happening is this is a way to reboot the brain right start it off from scratch so that you can create different neural pathways that are more healthy it’s the exact same thing that’s been studied with mushrooms and addiction that it helps kind of clean the brain

out so that you can start again i really hope that more science is going to be done in this area i’m i was surprised by the dearth of science but i think that we have the ability to measure this stuff now much more easily than we did 50 years ago and i really hope some researchers will will take this up yeah and of course this way of breathing is something i think you need to experience but when you say say rebirthing or psychological breakthroughs what does that mean how would you describe what have you heard from other

people what what happens in the breakthrough like that subjectively this was a term that came from stanislav groff and he was one of the first people to experience lsd when he was a psychiatrist in czechoslovakia and it was such a profound experience this is when it was fully legal and people and where sandoz was was just distributing lsd to psycho psychiatrists and saying this might be of use to you we created this for menstrual pain but it’s having all these other effects in people um this was in the 60s or when was this

this this was in the late 50s and he’s he was using lsd in top institutions and found it worked incredibly well for people with serious mental health issues but lsd was made illegal in 1968 and groff wanted to find a way of eliciting these same responses in his patients but not to get thrown in prison so he developed something called holotropic breath work which is where you breathe extremely heavily for hours at a time in a room with other people and what he found is holotropic breathwork had so many of the same effects as

lsd and it had a lot of the same therapeutic benefits for the people who were doing it so he is the one who came up with this terminology of the dark knight of the soul he said that this will put you through this this journey into your body into your mind and you’ll come out of the other side but it won’t always be pretty and so rebirthing uh is another uh technique that was uh developed in the late 60s early 70s under the same premise where in order to start fresh you have to go out and clean out the junk

in your mind to clean out all these different pathways and different feedback loops that you’ve created and breathing can be an extremely effective way of doing that because it’s not only psychosomatic it is causing a physiological change to occur in your body that is very profound that a lot of people have never felt in their lives and so they’re able to go into that and come out the other side and feel changed or restored in some ways yeah i remember the first time feeling my body like that is unbelievable it’s very

profound to just know that this is alive in such a way yeah i never did did the holotropic breathing for several hours i believe you did what what happens with your experience of time because our sound the the original holotropic breath work now they’re doing it for a shorter amount of times for the uh attention deficit disorder society that we live in now i think people are able to get away with an hour and i thought if i’m gonna do this i wanna i wanna do the whole thing so it’s about three hours it’s three

hours where you’re sitting on a mat very loud music and you are breathing as hard as you can for three hours and some people do it for two i think two is still worthy i think one uh it it’s part of the process to be so uncomfortable so at the beginning you know i did this because i wanted to understand it i wanna if i’m gonna write about it i wanna be able to write about it from the inside at the beginning you know the first 15 minutes and 15 minutes is a long amount of time i’m thinking there is no way i’m gonna be able to do

this for hours i feel miserable i was sweating but i was cold at the same time i thought this is idiotic and then you reach this state just like anything else it’s almost like exercise you know the beginning of of a run or a bike ride at least for me is always miserable you’re like oh i have to do this for for two hours and then you get into this flow state and this holotropic breath work is is just like that once you get into a flow and once it starts to take over you enter into some very very deep

states of altered consciousness and again i don’t view it as subjective i i know that there is so much happening in the body and brain to elicit these responses i will say that in the class um i think some people and i don’t want to judge anyone but i some people weren’t really breathing that heavily and were having these out of body experiences and turning into wolves and stuff so for them i i think it’s that sudden setting can elicit certain feelings i’m not sure that it’s so much a physiological response

for everyone but you can try for yourself sit on your bed and breathe really heavy for three hours and now you will feel changed in some way at the end of that process is there a difference in doing it together with other people in the room or doing it by yourself i think so just like there’s a difference in doing yoga in with a group or seen music with a group of people there’s just something about being in a community of people who are experiencing something at the same time as you are and i don’t

know what that is scientifically is it a vibe is it a mood is it a kinship is it a support system it’s probably all those things but i think it is important i think it’s very important to have a therapist there because some people can start having very strong reactions to this physical reactions mental reactions and you need someone there to talk you down you know if you tend to be someone who might be going into that that sort of state so i would highly suggest doing it with a group of people i

i wouldn’t do it alone on on your bed even though i just said you can try to do it alone on your bed try to do it for 15 minutes okay that’s fine if you have a heart condition or if you’re pregnant don’t over breathe for 15 minutes but anyone else you can try it and you know the wim hof method in which you’re doing 30 huge deep breaths you can reach some very deep states doing doing that i often do i you know there isn’t a time i do that that don’t really have a strong physical reaction to it and it’s

wonderful a big fan of of that breath work sudarshan kriya as well um yeah now i can relate to what you’re saying like i said within our programs we do it as well then it’s just an hour so it’s the um maybe it’s nothing compared to the three but with the music and when it’s being guided it’s it’s there can be very profound but if you don’t have someone who facilitates it i think you’re also lacking the trust to get into the unknown yes yeah i i i don’t want to dismiss uh the hour-long version that this is probably i and i probably

just sound like a jerk now that’s probably very helpful for people who have never done it before as an introduction but i think you you can acknowledge that the further you go into something the more rewards might be at the end of it it’s just it it is not the most pleasant thing you’ve done but at the end you can really feel something yeah with all that you know about breathing what would you wish for a society to integrate in the next couple of years what what if you would envision um your biggest dream when it comes to

breathing and the place it gets maybe within schools or within companies or for just people individually what would you envision the great thing about breathing is it’s free our breath is something we carry with us all day long and it can have really profound transformative effects to your mental state and your physical state all of this we know it’s all scientifically validated so this sounds so boring because it’s so simple but the very first thing i would suggest people do is to just become aware of

your breath it starts with that because once you come become aware of your breath you can notice when your breathing starts falling off you can notice when you’re over breathing when you’re under breathing when you’re holding your breath and then you can fix your breathing so it once you start with that foundation of awareness and acknowledging that this is an extremely powerful thing you’ve got at your disposal anytime during the day or night whether you’re watching tv whether you’re working out whether

you’re in front of your computer answering emails you can help focus your breath and when you do that you can have a really a very strong influence on how your body and brain are functioning so i wish it was something more glamorous and sexy than that but again nature is is simple uh yet subtle and i think our breathing is simple yet subtle but that doesn’t mean it can’t be profound at the same time thank you do you think it should be taught at schools just the way you breathe absolutely is that happening somewhere right now

well if you think of what happened to nutrition so we knew in the 1800s that processed industrial food was garbage we knew it there are studies scientists acknowledge this they said it’s actually ruining our faces this processed food is making our mouths too small it’s making our teeth crowded it’s ruining our breathing it’s ruining our bodies we’re not growing tall enough anymore and all of this is documented but it took a hundred years for that message to get through so now i’m hoping kids are being taught

about nutrition you need to eat a lot of vegetables not just packaged cheetos and pepsi right um and so our breath it’s it’s such an easy thing to teach and kids love this stuff because it’s instantaneous if you change your diet you know maybe you’re going to see results in a couple of weeks or a month but if you change your breathing you’re going to feel results in a couple of seconds and so especially with kids how much stress is on kids nowadays this is such a wonderful tool and you don’t really

need to beg them to do it just like you need to beg them to eat their broccoli or spinach they they’ll want to do it with all the work i’ve been working with a group that works with the un and we’re trying to get more of this messaging out to kids in developing nations because breathing is free and it can really help you in so many ways so i think that absolutely it should be taught in schools at the beginning of a class to have kids breathe in a certain way they’ll giggle they’ll make fun of it

but they’ll also feel it and they’ll also calm down so also for office workers you know that there isn’t anyone who can’t benefit from this stuff and we know that from the scientific record and you can again you can feel it so quickly if if you feel this change happening in your body after a couple seconds right like wow i feel calm i feel some warmth in my body because my circulation is increasing guess what’s gonna happen after a couple of days or a couple of weeks or a couple of months right your body is

really gonna respond to this in so many ways so there are no negative side effects to breathing well there are only benefits so i i can’t see why why people wouldn’t want to do this i don’t know if you do this but can you guide me and the listeners through a very simple breathing exercise just for a few seconds sure um there’s so many and there are so many are variations on the same uh theme but i’m just gonna do two i know you asked for one but this first one’s so quick and easy this is by dr andrew huberman down at

stamford university has been researching this for a while he calls it a physiological sigh and so if you notice a lion before it it goes down to sleep or a dog they go then they put their head down so we have a different sub a whole a separate subsect of neurons in our brain responsible for sign and we can turn those on by making ourselves sigh and when we do that we reset our breathing and we instantly calm our bodies so all this is is one breath on top of the other with a very calm exhale so it goes like this

it’s okay to breathe through your mouth on that exhale that’s just fine for this exercise so it’s two breaths in and then exhale very slowly exhale do it again two breaths in and then exhale so this is the quickest way that you can reset stress in your body and you can relax yourself i don’t know if you’re feeling what i’m feeling after doing something but it is so calming and the fact that this is being researched at one of the top research institutions in our country is thrilling to me so if you want to further relax your

body this may be a little challenging for people who haven’t done a lot of breath work but you can just do it to whatever length is comfortable for you we’re gonna inhale to four we’re gonna hold for seven and we’re gonna exhale for eight if that hold is too long cut it down to six and exhale for four five right it doesn’t it doesn’t matter but if you can stick with this i think you’ll feel something so i’ll lead you through this again inhale to four hold for seven with a long exhale to aid again you can

exhale through your mouth for this if you want and go shhh exhaling through your nose is just fine as well so here we go inhale two three four hold two three four five six seven exhale three four five six seven eight do it again inhale two three four hold two three four five six seven exhale three four five six seven eight so if you do that through a few patterns you’re going to notice that you’re either holding your breath or exhaling for about 70 to 80 percent of the time when we exhale and hold our breath in

this way we trigger a parasympathetic or calming rest and relaxation response so when we inhale we’re triggering a slight sympathetic response which is why your heart rate goes up when you inhale but holding your breath and exhaling the heart rate’s going to go down so that 478 breath work you can see a zillion youtube videos of it it’s all over the place but it’s a great thing to do to calm yourself down or to do right before you’re going to sleep you do a few rounds of that maybe five to ten rounds and you’ll feel your body getting

calm so these are two that i use all the time if i’m getting stressed out i’ll just do a [Applause] that physiological sigh and then maybe i’ll do some 478 breaths after that and i notice it has an extremely calming effect on your body and mind that’s measurable and that’s what’s so convincing to me about it awesome thank you for sharing this i never tried those so i will experiment with it definitely in the next couple of days with with the success of your book uh what is up next for you as a writer and journalist

well i have another book idea but it’s just too soon to go back into my little shed that i built in my backyard for the next four years and and uh just work on that so i’ve been very busy with the breath stuff uh which has been fantastic it’s an interesting experience for ryder to go from interviewing people and basically living in this very closed world where you’re just in front of your computer and just thinking in your interior world to being the person that’s being interviewed it’s a it’s a weird

juxtaposition um at the same time it’s refreshing because it gets a little lonely being in that writerly world uh but i do miss parts of it i miss the solace i miss the quietness of it i miss the meditation of just thinking about something day in and day out and processing it so beyond a new book idea which i’ve had zero time to to write down i am working um on a concept for a mini-series where we’ll be taking a lot of things that we talked about not just breathing but but other views into health and putting this into

a mini-series looking at the anthropology looking at evolution looking at different elements and looking at how our bodies have changed over the past few centuries for the worse and how we can get them back so that’s currently what i’m spending the most time on and um after that i’m hoping to relax a bit uh because it’s been a pretty crazy year for a lot of reasons you know the the pandemic but but also uh a lot of work so i’m i’m hoping to do some traveling once things really open up uh clear my brain a bit

and uh reboot for the next project yeah great where can people find you on a website social media if they want to dive into of course your book i think can be bought anywhere how can we find you i have a website where my publisher allowed me to reprint the entire bibliography of the book so there’s about 400 scientific references with videos i did some interviews with experts in the field professors at harvard and other leading institutions all of that’s for free because i realize a lot of what i’m

saying sounds pretty crazy to a lot of people your breathing can’t help cure your posture problems it can’t help cure autoimmune diseases but look at the science first before you make up your mind so that’s available at mr james nester.com that’s an mrjamesnester.com and there’s other resources there various videos and instructional videos all free for everybody i’m also on instagram i’m trying to get better at the social media thing which for an older person is so mystifying but uh i’m only posting

things that are about the science of breathing and related subjects on my instagram channel i’m also having different interviews with experts in the field so you can hear from this research not from me not from a reporter but from the actual people who have been doing it for decades thank you and thank you for your time today and sharing your book and all your knowledge with the world i think it’s really special thank you very much for having me thank you if you like this video please press like share

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