Breath
The New Science of a Lost Art
by James Nestor
summarized by Adrie Kuil
Brief summary
This book is a scientific adventure into the lost art and science of breathing. Breathe through your nose, all day and all night. The key to optimum breathing is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume. 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.
Full summary
This summary is an informal write-up of my understanding of the key messages from the book Breath by James Nestor.
This book is a scientific adventure into the lost art and science of breathing.
A congested nasal cavity decreases airflow, which increases bacteria and can lead to infections.
Inhaling air through the mouth decreases pressure. This causes the soft tissues in the back of the mouth to become loose and flex inward, creating less space and making breathing more difficult. Mouthbreathing causes more mouthbreathing. Sleeping with open mouth intensifies breathing difficulties and sleep apnea, as gravity pulls the soft tissues in the throat and tongue down, closing off the airway even more.
Inhaling through the nose forces air against the flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and breathing easier. After a while tissues stay in this wide position. Nasal breathing causes more nasal breathing.
Obstructive sleep apnea can lower your oxygen levels to 90 percent or below. If this goes on too long, it can lead to heart failure, depression, memory problems, and early death. Chronic sleep apnea increases the need to urinate. Mouthbreathing causes the body to lose 40 percent more water, making you wake up parched.
Chronic insomnia is often a breathing problem.
Breathe through your nose, all day and all night. The nose clears and heats air, and moistens it for easier absorption. One nostril will open as the other will softly close throughout the day, in a cycle. The nose pressurizes air so that the lungs can extract more oxygen with each breath. This is why nasal breathing is far more healthy and efficient than breathing through the mouth.
Mouthbreathing contributes to periodontal disease, bad breath and cavities. It is a cause of and a contributor to snoring and sleep apnea. Avoid mouthbreathing by taping your mouth shut at night with a medical tape with a gentle adhesive.
The nasal cavities (sinuses) can release a sixfold boost of nitric oxide (NO), a molecule that plays an essential role in increasing circulation and delivering oxygen into cells. The amount of nitric oxide in the body can heavily influence our immune function, weight, circulation, mood and sexual function.
Use it or lose it. When the nose is not used regularly, it will atrophy. Snoring and sleep apnea often follow. Constantly using the nose, trains the tissues inside the nasal cavity and throat to flex and stay open. Shut your mouth.
Just a few minutes of daily bending and stretching can expand lung capacity. Larger lungs equal longer lives. Aging doesn’t have to be a one-way path of decline. Lungs are malleable, and we can change them at nearly any time. Moderate exercise like walking or cycling has been shown to boost lung size by up to 15 percent.
The carbon dioxide in our blood plays an important role in the release of oxygen from the blood: blood with more carbon dioxide releases more oxygen. Muscles used during exercise produce more carbon dioxide, which causes these muscles to receive more oxygen. Carbon dioxide also has a dilating effect on blood vessels, so they can carry more oxygen-rich blood to hungry cells.
Big, rapid, heavy breaths are bad for us because they deplete our body of carbon dioxide. Just a few moments of heavy breathing could cause reduced blood flow to muscles, tissues and organs. We’d feel light-headed, cramp up, get a headache, or even black out.
To balance oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the body, we need to inhale and exhale slowly, around 5.5 breaths a minute. When breathing at a normal rate, our lungs absorb only about a quarter of the available oxygen in the air. By taking longer breaths, we allow our lungs to soak up more oxygen in fewer breaths.
Anywhere between 12 and 20 breaths a minute is considered medically normal today, with an average intake of about half a liter per breath. The key to optimum breathing is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume. Breathe less by extending the length of time between inhalations and exhalations. The only way to retain a slow resting heart rate is with slow breaths. The optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters. The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales.
The first step to improve airway obstruction is to maintain correct “oral posture”: hold the lips together, with teeth lightly touching, and with your tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck. When sitting or standing, the spine should be perfectly straight until it reaches the small of the back. While maintaining this posture, we should always breathe slowly through the nose into the abdomen.
Tongue-thrusting exercises can make breathing easier. For instance “mewing”, where you push the back of the tongue against the back roof of the mouth and move the rest of the tongue forward, like a wave, until the tip hits just behind the front teeth.
Breathing is a power switch to our automatic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system stimulates relaxation and restoration. The deeper and more softly we breath in, and the longer we exhale, the more slowly our heart beats and the calmer we become. The sympathetic nervous system sends stimulating signals to our organs, telling them to get ready for action. Taking short, hasty breaths switches on the sympathetic nerves, which increases our heart rate and constricts our blood vessels.
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.
Breathing is an automatic function we can consciously control.
Stress-inducing overbreathing methods, like the inner fire (Tummo) breathing or Holotropic Breathwork, bring us in an extended state of extreme sympathetic stress by letting us consciously breathe heavily for an extended period of time. This can be a way to rebalance a stressed nervous system and keep it balanced. It forces the body into a state of high stress, followed by a state of extreme relaxation. It allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken.
Whenever our body is forced to take in more air than it needs, we’ll exhale too much carbon dioxide, which will narrow the blood vessels and decrease circulation, especially in the brain. Brain blood flow can decrease by 40 percent, which can elicit powerful hallucinations, including out-of-body experiences and waking dreams. The primitive limbic system may even think the body is dying.
Human subjects that were administered a single breath of carbon dioxide reported feelings of suffocation and many had full-fledged panic attacks, even though their oxygen levels hadn’t changed and the subjects knew they were not in danger.
Our bodies determine how fast and often we breathe by the level of carbon dioxide: rising carbon dioxide levels stimulate the body to breathe faster and more deeply, falling levels direct the body to breathe more slowly.
People with anorexia, or panic or obsessive-compulsive disorders consistently have low carbon dioxide levels. They breathe far too much, eventually become hypersensitized to carbon dioxide and panic if they sense a rise in this gas. They are anxious because they’re overbreathing, and are overbreathing because they’re anxious. Panic is usually preceded by an increase in breathing volume and rate, and a decrease in carbon dioxide. To stop an attack before it strikes, breath slower and less to increase carbon dioxide.
Breathing slow, less and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body, and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity.
Breathing, like any therapy or medication, can’t do everything. Severe problems require medical attention. Breathing techniques are best suited to serve as preventative maintenance, a way to retain or bring back balance in the body.
Breathe through the nose. To increase our chances of survival, the human body has evolved the capacity to breathe through two channels. Should the nose get obstructed, the mouth can temporarily take over the breathing. Breathing through the nose is the default, the body is not designed for mouthbreathing hours at a time, day or night.
Exhale longer. Extend exhalations to get all the air out of your lungs before inhaling.
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.