Breathing Exercises For Beginners - James Nestor

There are so many different configurations of this breathing, but they all do generally the same thing. I have my theories, but the nose provides what secondary tertiary benefits for bringing in the breath through your nose. If you breathe the breath through your mouth right now, how hard is that to do? It's not hard at all. All of that air goes directly into your lungs. If you breathe the breath through your nose, it's a lot more resistance. And because there is more resistance, that air is pressurized and it is cleaned and filtered. So this is our first line of defense against pollution, against viruses, against bacteria, against mold. It's our noses. So not only do they pressurize that air and help filter it, but our noses release a huge profusion of nitric oxide, which battles viruses, okay? Helps kill viruses and bacteria. And you've got a population about 25 to 50%. I've seen numbers higher than that, a little lower, but it's a lot of us are habitual mouth breathers. At night, that percentage goes up to more than 60% of us breathe through our mouths at night. So one of the things you talk about in the book is how to potentially prevent breathing through your mouth at night. And that's to tape your mouth. Could you speak to that one second? Yeah, I'm so scared this is going to be on my gravestone when I die. This was my contribution to humanity, but I would love to take credit for it. It wasn't my discovery. I heard about this from a breathing therapist at Stanford. Then I heard about it from so many other dentists and people have been doing this for literally decades. So there is a problem with breathing through your mouth at night. You tend to stress yourself out. It's very inefficient. You expose your lungs. We already mentioned that. It makes you much more apt to snore. It can even make you more apt to suffer from sleep apnea. And so what do you do about that? You're unconscious. You can't consciously shut your mouth shut. So a hundred years ago, there's advertisements for chin straps. People used to wear these to keep their mouth shut. Not too into that. So I learned about sleep tape, which I don't have. I found a little piece of painter's tape here, but this is the technology of sleep tape, everybody. You put a piece of tape about this size on your lips and that's it. This should not be a hermetic seal. This isn't a hostage situation. It's a reminder to keep your mouth shut. And I cannot tell. This is the one thing I've heard more from people than anything else, is how wearing a teeny piece of free tape has transformed their sleep because they're tracking their sleep. And for a lot of people, it's either reduced their snoring or eliminated it entirely. Amazing. So it's almost a subconscious physical reminder while you're unconscious. It is. And just a warning to everyone, if you try to go and do it tonight, it's going to be miserable. You're going to hate it. That misery is going to last for a couple weeks. If you want to get into closing your mouth at night, wear this little piece of tape for a half an hour a day while entering emails or doing dishes, some mundane task. Increase the time in the daytime. Get used to it. Get comfortable. Then move into doing it at night. So, you know, my own experience is it was comfortable at night doing it. I actually didn't realize it was such a small piece. So I went through the hermetically sealed duct tape on my mouth, but it still worked fine. And so I'll try the small piece as a new experiment. Different strokes for different. I'll just say, sometimes people really like the big fat strip of tape. That's cool. I'm not here to pass judgment. Whatever works for you, works for you. What I am going to say is breathe through your nose and especially breathe through your nose at night while you're sleeping and track it and there is a very good chance you'll see your sleep quality significantly improve. Amazing. So everybody watching, if you do nothing else, please realize the criticality. We spend a third of our life sleeping or we should if we're looking to be healthy and making sure that's a high quality sleep. Let's talk about breathing rate. So, you know, on my Aura app, which I measure my sleep with, it gives you your breathing rate and it's pretty at night solid at 15 breaths per minute. I'm curious. Have you been able to reduce your breathing rate at night from any practices versus the conscious breathing rate during the day? When you practice slower breathing techniques and when you become very picky about how you're breathing in the day, that bleeds into how you breathe at night. We know this because breathing practices, these slow and easy practices have been shown to be very effective for people with sleep apnea, whether or not they use sleep tape. You say, well, how can that be? Imagine breathing really heavy right now. How easy is it to cause that vibration in the back of the throat? Now breathe very, very slowly and softly through your nose. Try to snore when you're breathing that way. It's almost impossible. So luckily there's a study booting up with a researcher at Harvard, your old alma mater, who is looking at using these breathing techniques and then measuring what happens with people with sleep apnea, how they reduce their symptoms or help alleviate it for some forms of sleep apnea. So let's go into the breathing rate a little more deeply. Again, our sort of default breathing rate at 15 breaths per minute, your advice at getting down to 10 or as low as 6, and there's various breathing techniques and I want to go into that in a couple of minutes where you take us through some exercises for my own benefit, but for everybody here. Making this conscious in your life is one of the most important things because you can breathe more shallow, you can breathe less frequently, but it requires a conscious shift at least early on. Any advice on that? It's a habit and once you've had a bad habit for decades and decades, switching over to a better habit takes a long time. We're very impatient people in this modern world. We want things to happen in a day. It's not going to happen in a day. For some people it can happen after a few weeks, for some people it can happen after a few months. Luckily, we're breathing all the time. You're breathing while you're answering email, while you're working, while you're walking around. So you can take those times to start focusing on your breath a little more. I'm not saying you have to carry around a notepad or whatever, but you can use maybe set little timers on your phone every hour. Just check in. Just one little bell goes out. How am I breathing? What's my rate? How deeply am I breathing? Am I breathing in a calm way? And I don't want to give a prescription on how people should do this because there's a zillion ways and everyone's different on what they're really going to attach to and identify with. But I will tell you that the science is very clear. By controlling your breathing, by adopting these healthy habits, it is going to have a positive effect on your health, period. I know this to be true intellectually and just in my soul. And I think of you at least a couple times a day, James, as I reflect on my breathing. And so, a friend of mine, Will Henshall, who's one of our Abundance360 members, he runs a company called Focus at Will, he had had a life-changing event where he had a heart attack and died and then came back. And he just remembers and pays reverence to that breath as the fundamental part of life. You know, I remember him telling the story in such a compelling fashion that, you know, breath equals life in that regard. Please. I was just going to say there's been so much focus on healthy eating. And, of course, what you eat is going to impact your health. There's no doubt about it. But how do we get most of our energy? Most of it comes from air. It comes from oxygen. So, how you take that air in and how you exhale it, of course, it's going to make a difference to your energy levels, to your general health. And operating more efficiently is going to give you more energy to repair and to restore, which is what almost all of us need right now, living in the modern world. So, we're going to go to questions from the Abundance community and from Social Stream in a moment. But if you don't mind, take us through some of the fundamental breathing techniques that you speak about in the book that is a gift to the community here to take away from today. These are going to seem so completely simple and basic that a lot of people aren't going to think they're going to do much. But just because something is simple doesn't mean it's not powerful. So, a great one that I learned from Dr. Andrew Huberman at Stanford, who's been studying breathing for the past couple of years, is whenever you're at that moment where you feel anxious, you feel a little tension, you need to reset, right? So, what's a way of resetting? For some people, that's going sitting in the dark and meditating for 20 minutes. That's great. That works. But sometimes we're in an airport or we're at a conference. We're about to speak and we need that little reset. Take two inhales, one on top of the other. Huberman calls this a physiological sigh. So, it looks like this. And then very calmly let it flow out. So, that's two big inhales. Do that about three or four times and then go into a slow breathing about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out. Do this for as long as you want, a minute or two, and I think you'll feel something amazing happening in your brain and in your body. As you are entering a state of calm, you're resetting that panic feedback loop, that anxiety, and you're telling your body, it's time to start over again and start in a calmer way. I feel it already, just from trying it twice. You can look at your heart rate for skeptics out there, say, oh, it's a placebo effect. Do your own measurements. Look at your heart rate variability, right? Look at your blood pressure before. I actually did the experiment with my blood pressure cuff and I was able to reduce my blood pressure, my systolic by like 10 points. It was incredible. Yeah, you don't hear about that in your doctor's office. Never heard about it. I went through four years of medical school, never heard a damn thing about breathing. Yeah, well, my father-in-law is a pulmonologist, been a pulmonologist for 40, 50 years and he hadn't heard 85% of the stuff that I found in the book. So, there you go. Okay, so that is in a situation of anxiety. You want to reset sort of like your physiology. I get that. What's another one? I think a good one, and Andrew Weil made this very famous, 4-7-8 breathing. This is when you really want to come down. So, I would not do this before you're going for an interview and you need a reset. This is when you want to go to sleep. You're on a plane. You want to go to sleep. You're amped up. You had a very busy day and all it is is inhale to a count of 4, hold for 7, exhale for 8. So, of course, we're going to do this everybody. Ready? Here we go. Inhale 1, 2, 3, 4, hold 7, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, exhale 8, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc, etc. About 4 breaths per minute. And a lot of people use box breathing. I'm just going to slip this one in there while we're talking about this. Box breathing is 4-4-4. So, inhale to 4, hold for 4, exhale to 4, hold for 4. What do both of those breathing patterns have in common? Well, for about 75% of it, you're either holding your breath or you're exhaling. When you hold your breath, when you exhale, your heart rate goes down. You calm down. So, there are so many different configurations of this breathing, but they all do generally the same thing. And you can use these anytime, anywhere. That 4-7-8 I find is pretty powerful stuff. So, I'll use it before going to bed and I'll stick with the physiological sigh if I'm out and about in the world. Hey, if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. It helps get the word out. And if you love the content that I talk about, present about, please subscribe to this channel. And one more thing, don't forget, please give me your comments down below. I love seeing what you think about all of this. We put a lot of time into it with incredible people and would love to have your feedback.