Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey everybody, it's Theo Vaughn here, and I got a question. When it comes to soda, are you really picking a zero sugar cola that you actually prefer, or are you just settling for what you've always had? That's the question. And I'll say this, when it comes to taste, I find that nothing beats Pepsi Zero Sugar. But you don't just have to take my word for it, that would be ridiculous.
Pepsi has been doing blind taste tests for years. No labels, no brand names, just taste. And last year they brought back the Pepsi challenge and the results were clear. 66% of people agreed and said that Pepsi zero sugar tastes better than Coca-Cola zero sugar. In fact, Pepsi Zero Sugar won in every market they tested.
So if you're grabbing a Zero Sugar soda, go with the one people keep choosing when taste is the only thing that matters. Go out and try Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Let your taste decide. Just a reminder, guys, you can now watch video versions of our episodes on Spotify as well. Today's guest is a best-selling author and scientific journalist. He's known for his expertise on breathing and breath work.
He just published a new edition of his book, Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. I'm going to learn a lot and so are you. Today's guest is Mr. James Nestor. Shut up! James Nestor, good to see you today, brother. Thanks for having me. You bet. You have a new, a revised edition of your New York Times bestseller, Breath, the new science of a lost art. That's it.
And you believe that how we breathe can change every aspect of our lives.
I don't believe this. I know this. And not every aspect, but many aspects, many aspects that people would not suspect. So it can change our athletic performance, vastly improve it. It can allow us to sleep better. It can allow us to think better, have better sex, if you're into that kind of thing. A whole bunch of other measurable improvements to our lives, and nobody's really thinking about it.
yeah, I guess it's something that we just don't think about very often. It's odd because it's happening all the time, but it's not on the front of our brains.
We don't think about it because we've evolved not to think about it, which is great. I mean, if we had to think about every single breath we were taking all the time, how awful that would be.
But it works in the background and the problem is we develop really bad habits and those habits start working on the background and we don't notice that those negative breathing habits are affecting how often we get headaches, how tired we are, the amount of cavities that we're getting, on and on and on. And so people just don't think about it because they don't need to.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of breathing according to James Nestor?
And concentrating it and using that energy to better our health. So these things have been around for thousands and thousands of years and probably well before that, but that's the first written document, right? That established how to breathe in certain ways to have certain benefits.
Yeah, that it seems like it should be something that should be taught in our schools then, that it should be just as basic as learning a spell or to read. It's like, because that's like your lungs reading the universe. It's like your body reading the universe moment to moment.
Yeah, there's a lot of things that should be taught at our schools, right? Nutrition, exercise, like staying away from electronic devices at night. So, but I would put, we talk a lot about that, right? At least this is in the public consciousness right now, right? So we're having these discussions. Nobody's talking about breathing.
And even though kids, you can look at a kid about, there's a 50% chance they are breathing through their mouth. There's around a 90% chance they are breathing dysfunctionally. And so if you're breathing this way, it's gonna affect your ability to focus. It's going to affect your oral health.
We've also found if you're breathing dysfunctionally at night, you have something called sleep disorder breathing. It affects how tall you're gonna grow and affects your facial structure. all of these things. And I don't hear anybody talking about this. I thought that there would, you know, I was so idiotic when this book first came out. I was talking at medical schools.
I was blasting this message all around. I was like, oh, I'm really going to make some change here. It was completely ignorant. Nothing's changed. So people have to take this information and do it for themselves because I don't trust, you know, governments to really get this information out the way it should be uh, distributed and, and accepted and understood.
Yeah. Well, they just finished remodeling the food pyramid, you know? So I think it's like, you know, it takes a while for them to change shape. Apparently. Um, you said oral hygiene, that's, and you mentioned cavities earlier. Take me through, take me through that.
Yeah, so I was reading, a lot of my job is spending time in these really creepy medical libraries, right? And looking through old literature to see what we were saying way back when, to see if it's right today.
And so many different dentists and different people in medicine, 100 years ago, 120 years ago, were saying the number one cause of cavities wasn't sugar, it wasn't carbohydrates, it was mouth breathing. And I said, huh, I guess those guys were just old, they were stupid, right? But now the majority of dentists I talk to who study the airway say the number one cause of cavities is mouth breathing.
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Chapter 3: How does mouth breathing relate to dental health and braces?
It would be on billboards, you would think. I mean, that's huge. And the money that they would save them by taking care of their kids' breathing practices. What's causing kids to mouth breathe that much?
So we're born as perfect breathers, right? A healthy baby. Look at a healthy baby. It's a beautiful thing. Every breath, their stomach's moving out. They exhale. The stomach comes in again. They're breathing in and out of their nose because healthy babies learn how to do this because they're breastfeeding so often. If you're going to be feeding and breathing, that's the only way to do it.
Right, you have something in your mouth, you have to breathe through your nose.
Breathing in and out of your nose. So we lose this at around the age of five to six when we start going to school and start sitting up, spend 90% of our time indoors. That environment is not conducive to breathing. It's against our evolution. It's against what we have become adapted to be doing.
So one of the first thing that happens is our breathing starts going into the mouth because we tend to have allergies, right? Usually happens when a kid gets sick and they get congested. So we have a mouth. It's cool. You can breathe out of your mouth whenever you want. But that becomes the default. Mouth breathing is supposed to be an emergency pathway, not the default.
And then the kid just remains a mouth breather on and on and on throughout their youth. I was one of these kids. And they found that if you mouth breathe for long enough, it changes your facial shape and it doesn't allow your mouth to grow as wide as it should.
And then I guess if like cranially or the shape of our mouths aren't growing fully, then it would affect the way that our teeth are.
Yeah, so if your mouth is open all the time, you have this upper palate here that tends to grow up. I'm a great example, which is like completely malocclusion, which is why I had teeth pulled and braces and headgear and all that crap. So when the mouth is too small, teeth grow. have nowhere to grow, so they grow in crooked. That's why we have crooked teeth. People say, oh, it's a tooth problem.
It's a mouth problem. And if you have a mouth that's too small for your teeth, what's gonna happen to the airway? It's harder to breathe. Meanwhile, that upper palate of your mouth keeps growing up. And it takes away real estate from your science passages, which makes it harder to breathe through your nose. So all these things happen at once. This is not some crazy hypothesis or whatever.
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Chapter 4: What historical cultures emphasized the importance of breathwork?
Then you have to go to school like that guy, you know, with a with all this headgear. So I don't know why they did it. I mean, I think it was economical because you can just bring kids in, you do the same thing over and over and over and over. You also have to think about like, I had my wisdom teeth removed. I don't know if this was just something, you never question it.
It was just something they did. Why? No other species has to have wisdom teeth. None of our ancestors, if that were true, that our ancestors were getting impacted molars and dying of infections or whatever, we wouldn't be here today.
Yeah.
The practice of using braces to straighten teeth began in the early 19th century. French dentist Christophe Delabarre invented the first modern braces in 1819, a flat metal strip tied to teeth with thread to gradually align them. The term braces emerged in the early 1900s, coinciding with improvements like Edward Angle's brackets and wires. Wow. Oh, that's fascinating.
You see that all of these inventions came about at the exact time that industrialized food came into cultures. And this is why our mouths are so small, because we stopped chewing. And so right at the time, you always talk about, at least back in the day, people would talk about like British people and their teeth, right? This was some terrible joke people used to make. Oh, yeah, we still make it.
You still make it. The kids today are still doing this. But it turns out that England was one of the first countries to adopt an industrialized diet. So their teeth went to hell. Right off the bat, 50% of a population, 5-0% will have crooked teeth after adopting an industrialized diet in a single generation. People say that evolution, oh, it takes 100,000 years.
It takes a million years for things to change. It happens in one generation.
Well, if you even look at some of these primordial humans, like you're talking about, or primordial might not be the word, but if you're looking at some of these early human skulls, yeah, you can easily see the difference. And that's fascinating about the group in Africa, yeah. It's like they're running around complaining about cavities.
No, they're not complaining about heart disease. They're not complaining about diabetes. Like none of these things exist. So all of the modern diseases, not all of them, most of them, because there are some genetic diseases. Most of the diseases we're contending with today are diseases of civilization. These are diseases that have been brought upon us by industrialization.
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Chapter 5: How can breathing techniques improve athletic performance?
to breathe at around five seconds in, five seconds out. And you can feel what happens. Like- I feel calmer right now. And I even smiled a second ago.
It just came into my face.
I saw that.
You know, you did? That's cool.
Yeah.
For one second. Yeah. But hey, that's, for me, that's a lot. That's a lot of a day where I'm just naturally feeling good. And I'll tell you this, even momentarily after, and even- it started to make me want to just keep doing it as opposed to like, am I breathing in my nose? Am I breathing in my mouth? Just not consciously.
It started to like, I almost want to do it again and again because it feels good.
Well, here's the trick with these things. Like we don't need another box to check every day. You know, we got to, Oh, did I get my protein? Did I sleep by eight hours? Did I walk 20 minutes? All of that. What you want to do is to practice these things. techniques enough, right, that this becomes your new default. This becomes your unconscious breathing.
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Chapter 6: What role does breathing play in managing ADHD symptoms?
That can take a couple of months to do. They found some researchers here were helping 9-11 victims, you know, 20 years ago. When was it? 20, 24 years ago. And they had this terrible condition called ground glass lungs because they inhaled all of these pollutants, right, when the towers went down. And nothing worked for them.
Pharmaceutical drugs didn't work, nothing worked, except this practice was more effective than anything else because it allowed air to circulate properly in the lungs and allowed them to expel all the crap in their lungs. So not only mentally are you sharper, are you calmer, is your nervous system downregulated to a healthy spot, but also physically it can help your lungs be healthier.
Can you bring that up, Nick? Wow, this is so interesting. Ground glass lungs refers to a radiological finding on CT scans showing hazy opacities. Is that the right way to say that? Opacities. Opacities, thank you. In the lungs often linked to inflammation or fibrosis from inhaling toxic dust at ground zero after the 9-11 attacks.
The massive collapse of the World Trade Center has released a plume of pulverized concrete, asbestos, glass fibers, heavy metals, and jet fuel combustion by our products that coated lower Manhattan. Responders and nearby residents who breathe the dust develop persistent lung damage, including ground glass opacities.
The dust contained over 2,500 contaminants, 50% construction debris, 40% glass fibers, 9% cellulose and asbestos, silica, lead, mercury. Oh my God. The witch's brew was highly alkaline and caustic, equivalent to Drano in pH.
So the guy who started doing this, Richard Brown, is right down the street from us here. He's at Columbia. And he's the one that was dealing with all these people from 9-11 who had PTSD, who had ground glass lungs. And he published this, too, of how effective it was. So that when COVID came around, this was the go-to, breathing this way for so many people.
i've had coven like three times four times right and this did more for me than than anything that's subjective there wasn't a control version of me but this is something i've heard from hundreds and hundreds of people is if you don't lay on your back you get covered you're coughing right you feel like crap if you lay on your stomach and breathe at this rate around five to six seconds in five to six seconds out
It can really help and it's free and available for everyone. So why wouldn't you do it? There's no negative side effects to feeling better and getting more crap out of your lungs.
There's still something, though, even when you say, like, it's so funny, some of the most simplest things, we want something. It's like we want to, well, I need to buy this or not, but I'll go get that or I'll do a five-hour energy. Like we always want something else. Isn't that kind of interesting that that's how we operate?
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Chapter 7: How does sleep quality relate to breathing habits?
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Be the person who actually starts. Go to Shopify.com slash Theo and put some motion behind it, twin. That's right. Shopify.com slash T-H-E-O. Best of luck. This episode is brought to you by Sonic. Now listen, America has been asking for answers for a long time. And Sonic said, here's one. It's the $6 All-American Smasher meal. Mind blown at that price.
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Try the $6 Sonic All-American Smasher Meal today. Live free. Eat Sonic. Was there anything else on that World Trade Glass? That's unbelievable to me. And can you write down the name of that author too, Zach? Inhaling the dust led to WTC lung injury with firefighters losing up to 12 years of lung function. 70% of workers showed respiratory decline by 2004.
A Mount Sinai analysis found asbestos fibers in carbon nanotubes in responders' lungs. Wow, that's fascinating. What would be like a more difficult breathing exercise?
If we had an hour, I could get you extremely high with something. But we don't. So we're going to have to do some quick stuff here. If you are driving, if you are near water, do not do this. Use common sense. I just want to make that super clear. Yeah, I want to say that too.
to do not do it okay do not do it this is just for demonstration purpose only right you're sitting in a chair we're here it's cool you can try this there's a pranayama technique okay that when i am really jet lagged which is most of my waking hours i've noticed when i need energy when i need instant clarity you can do this it's a little weird you wouldn't want to do it in public but here we are and
I think you want to get a little weird, so why not? Let's do it. So the concept here is we are going to be breathing an inhale through the nose. Then you're going to be holding without exhaling. Then you're going to be breathing in again. Then you're going to be holding. Then you're going to be breathing in. You see where this is going.
You're going to keep doing that until you reach the very top of your breath, until you cannot fit any more air in your lungs. Okay. then you're gonna squeeze as hard as you can. You're gonna squeeze your fists, squeeze your toes, squeeze your butt, squeeze your stomach, squeeze everything and try to bring it inward towards the center of your abdomen.
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Chapter 8: What are some common misconceptions about breathing techniques?
It's chronic inflammation. Chronic stress is one of the leading causes of so many issues. So if you spend a few minutes a day, you don't have to do the weird stuff, right? There's other things you can do in public. No one realizes you're doing this. It's your own private little secret that you can do. And just to have that pressure release throughout the day.
A lot of people use yoga or exercise or weightlifting. All of those things are awesome. They work great, but it's not always available to you. Your breathing is always available to you. You can do that anytime.
Yeah, I mean, even just you reminding me to breathe in and out through my nose, that simple reminder, it just feels good. It just feels better. It's just like, yeah, no one's reminded me of that probably ever in my life. It just doesn't happen. I have to pee really fast. I'm going to tell you about an experience that I had with a breathwork person.
That also happens with some of these breathwork devices. I should have warned him.
Yeah, I just feel happier. I just feel a little bit happier even just going through this. So, yeah, thanks for the reminders. It's funny, I almost wanna keep doing it. It's almost like having a sip of coffee. It's like, I wanna keep doing it because it feels good. I took a breath work session one time with actually a comedian, this girl, Blair Sochi, who's very funny.
And she also on the side does breath work exercises with people. And she took me through this experience one time. I was laying down. I can't remember exactly what it was. I feel like it was some of what we just did, but it was for about maybe 30 minutes.
And at the end, I like just tears were, I mean, I had like one of the biggest, like just kind of emotional releases that I've had, um, outside of an experience with drugs, like an ayahuasca or something like that, or mushrooms. Um, It was super profound. There's a lot of videos out there of people having profound experiences after breathwork.
Videos of people were just really breaking down after breathwork. I'm sure you've seen a lot of this.
I've seen a lot of it online, but I've also seen a lot of it in person. And the question from a journalist standpoint that I have is how much of this is the breathwork and how much of it is these people trying to show off that they're really having a bigger breakdown than the person next to them?
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