Take A Breath

Journalist James Nestor didn’t plan to write a book on breathing. As often happens with creative work, it actually came to him while he was working on another writing gig.

About 10 years ago, Nestor was sent on an assignment to write about free divers. “I learned that you could do all these amazing things with your breathing — like hold your breath for seven, eight and nine minutes — and dive down to 300 feet,” Nestor recalls. “I also learned you can use breathing to do other things like improve your health or to heat your body up and change your posture — all these things that sound completely crazy until you do the research, and you find out that they’re all verified,” he says.

At the time, he was also having personal respiratory problems for which he couldn’t find a cure. A doctor friend suggested that he look into breathing practices. “It really worked for me, and I thought there might be a larger story there,” Nestor says.

Simple Facts

Breath is necessary for life. With it being something that we do on our own every day, we asked Nestor why it was important to write “Breath: The New Science Of  A Lost Art.”

“Because [breathing] is so obvious, and we’ve been trained in the Western world that only complicated things can help us — which is why we’ve overcomplicated eating to the extent that people are weighing their fat versus their protein versus their carbs, and they’re taking this supplement, that supplement, this vitamin, that mineral,” says Nestor. “And it doesn’t need to be that complicated. I think we’ve done that because it’s very lucrative for a lot of people to overcomplicate things,” Nestor says.

Breathing, he says, has been stuck in a no man’s land between New Age pseudoscience and hardcore, medical academic data. “With the medical side, these studies are so hard to parse that the average person couldn’t understand them if they wanted [to]. On the New Age side, so much of what they’re saying is complete garbage,” he says. “New Age people claim that breathwork can help reduce cancer, cure MS, other chronic diseases. None of this is true, of course.” As a result, the average person thinks they already know what they need to about breathing.

According to Nestor, they would be wrong.

“The vast majority of the modern population around the world is breathing dysfunctionally. What does that mean? It means you’re either breathing too much or you’re breathing through your mouth. You’re holding your breath while you’re working or you’re breathing in an improper way when you’re exercising. You have asthma or COPD or you’re snoring or you have sleep apnea,” Nestor says.

He admits that he got a lot of pushback about this with people saying it was impossible that so many are breathing in a dysfunctional way. “I’m not making this up. Look at the CDC data on respiratory issues and respiratory disorders. That’s where I got all this information,” Nestor explains. “Once you learn about it, you think, ‘What can I do about it?’ And that’s what the book is about — first, acknowledging that our respiratory issues are a huge epidemic and then [asking], ‘What are the steps forward?’”

In Through The Nose

Nature, Nestor says, is simple. One thing that you could do today to help your health and change the way you breathe, he adds, is also simple. “The first thing you can do is breathe through your nose for the majority of your breaths. At night, you have to learn to be a nasal breather. About 60 to 65 percent of the population breathes through their mouths at night,” says Nestor. “It’s influencing our health in all the wrong ways. That’s the first step. If you never find a way of becoming an obligate nasal breather, I don’t think you’ll be a healthy breather, period.”

That said, Nestor says that when people read that, they often panic and get paranoid if they take a breath in and out of their mouths. “When you’re laughing, when you’re sighing, sometimes when you’re working out at really intense levels, breathing through your mouth is completely fine — especially if it’s a conscious act. I’m talking about the other 95 percent of the breaths you’re taking. [They] should be in and out through the nose,” he says.

Personal Journey

Surprisingly, Nestor didn’t write about his personal health issues in “Breath” but he points out that he had a very specific reason for not doing it. “I did not want this book to be my journey into breathing health, and I did not want people to think that my personal experience is going to be their personal experience. Everyone’s different, right? Everyone’s going to respond differently to everything. People respond differently to surgery, medication, exercise, food — everything,” he says.

One of the things that really inspired him to spend more than five years writing a book about breathing was all the respiratory issues he had — including getting bronchitis and mild pneumonia every year, as well as headaches. He also had problems with mouth breathing. “All that — they all completely went away. One hundred percent. Gone. I haven’t had one since, and that was 10 years ago,” Nestor says.

“A doctor might say, ‘That’s your experience. It could have been other things in your life.’ That’s one hundred percent true, which is why I don’t usually talk about this. I will say that my personal experience with this stuff completely changed my health and completely changed my life. Will this be the same experience for someone else? Absolutely not. But the only way you’re going to find out is if you do it. The good thing about breathing healthy is it’s free, it’s easy, it’s simple and it’s available to everybody.”

The New Directions Luncheon

On March 3, Nestor will be speaking at The New Directions Luncheon to benefit National Jewish Health at Boca West Country Club. He’s excited about it because NJH is a leader in pulmonary care.

“I hope to share with them that breathing dysfunction is a worldwide epidemic, and it’s debilitating people. If you want to create some sort of systematic change in the way that people are treated, I think you have to start with those who are treating people: the doctors, the physicians, the respiratory therapists. There are very simple things that you can do and doctors can tell patients to do that have a measurable improvement on someone’s health, whether that’s anxiety, panic, asthma, COPD and more,” says Nestor. “I think one of the first things that doctors should look at when you’ve got a kid with ADHD, someone with panic attacks, chronic fatigue at night is to look at their breathing. Look at their breathing health, especially their breathing at night. Are they snoring? Do they have sleep apnea? Are they breathing through the mouth? There are so many people with undiagnosed sleep disorder breathing issues, and it’s destroying their health.”

Right There The Whole Time

When Nestor was working on this book, he discovered a lot of unusual concepts that he hadn’t heard about before. For example, he says, “I discovered that the human face, over the past 300 years, has become so deformed that our teeth no longer fit in our mouths. That’s why we have crooked teeth, and that’s why so many of us are dysfunctional breathers — because our faces are caved in now [as opposed to how they were shaped hundreds of years ago].”

Nestor was completely stunned when he discovered this. Having studied evolution and anthropology in college, he didn’t understand why he hadn’t heard about this back then. He wanted to know two things: Why is nobody talking about this and how could this story have been out in the world the whole time, yet no one seems to have discovered it? He found that it explained so much about our health and our dysfunctional breathing.

Breathing has been part of mainstream science for the past one hundred years and there are tens of thousands of studies looking at breathing health and correlations between attention span, focus, athletic performance and more. “It’s not fringe science. The problem is so much of that research has stayed in institutions and hasn’t gotten out to the general public.”

As for his book and its message, Nestor says that there is scientific evidence for it: “It was firmly within institutions for so long. Some of it went by the wayside when we discovered pills that we thought would do the same thing as other interventions. But we find now, decades and decades later, that it looks like those pills don’t do everything we thought they would. The people I interviewed [for ‘Breath’] were at Yale, Harvard and Stanford. I worked down at Stanford for months. It’s not fringe science. I would almost call it a shadow science or an edge science, because it’s there — it’s within the canon of science. But it’s just been somewhat ignored.”