\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n the last stages of writing his book, Breath, James Nestor was stressed. \u201cWhich was ironic when writing a book about breathing patterns and mellowing out,\u201d he says. The book was late; he\u2019d spent his advance and was haemorrhaging even more money on extra research that was taking him off in new, potentially interesting, directions \u2013 was it really necessary, he wondered, to go to Paris to look at old skulls buried in catacombs beneath the city? (It was.)<\/p>\n Then a couple of months before the book\u2019s May 2020 publication date, the Covid pandemic hit, and Nestor was advised to wait it out. He couldn\u2019t afford to. \u201cOne of the main motivations for releasing it at that time was to get that [on-publication] advance,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I\u2019ll be honest, I didn\u2019t want to release it. I said: \u2018How are you going to promote a book that can\u2019t be sold in stores, that I can\u2019t tour for?\u2019\u201d He expected, he says, \u201cabsolutely zero to happen\u201d.<\/p>\n But it turned out that a book that reminded people of the power of breathing \u2013 in the midst of a respiratory illness pandemic \u2013 was what the world wanted. It has since sold more than 3m copies.<\/p>\n Five years on, Nestor has updated the book with a revised preface, and other new material including his latest enthusiasm: testing the air quality of hotel rooms and planes, some of <\/strong>which, according to his readings, contain alarmingly high levels of CO2. He has learned a lot since the 2020 publication, he says, from all the letters sent by readers and additional experts he has spoken to. The popularity of \u201cbreathwork\u201d, or breathing exercises, as a wellness trend has taken off, but it hasn\u2019t yet become mainstream.<\/p>\n <\/span>Not yet mainstream \u2026 Breathwork has taken off as a wellness trend. Nestor used to believe breathing was binary. \u201cYou\u2019re doing it, you\u2019re alive; you\u2019re not doing it, that\u2019s bad news.\u201d The author is at home in Portugal where he now lives, speaking calmly \u2013 perhaps this is what more than a decade of breath research does \u2013 over Zoom. He has spent the morning working on his next book, which is nearly finished, though he won\u2019t say what it\u2019s about.<\/p>\n Before he became interested in breathing, Nestor was living in San Francisco and plagued by recurrent respiratory problems, getting mild pneumonia most years. He went for dinner with a friend, a doctor, and she told him his breathing was off. \u201cI guess I was breathing through my mouth. She could hear me across the table, really laboured breaths, and she suggested I go to a breathwork class.\u201d<\/p>\n For his first experience of Sudarshan Kriya, a rhythmic breathing technique, Nestor somewhat reluctantly joined a group in a dusty old house in the bohemian Haight-Ashbury area of the city. The experience, he says, was \u201cabsolutely revelatory\u201d. Sitting on the floor in a draughty room, Nestor sweated from head to toe (the practice is believed to generate energy). \u201cIt was not subtle. It was extreme, almost violent, which I liked, because it showed me that there was something extremely powerful here.\u201d For the next few days he felt lighter, less anxious. \u201cI felt so completely different, and I do every time I do this breathwork practice.\u201d He does it online most weeks now; each session is about 45 minutes, with 25 minutes of intense breathing. \u201cI love it. I love that energy.\u201d<\/p>\n Nestor grew up in California and, after college, worked as a copywriter for many years, writing articles in evenings and weekends, before he became a full-time freelance journalist. Around the time he started regularly going to that breathwork class, he took an assignment in Greece to write about freedivers, who could dive to great depths while holding their breath for several minutes. \u201cThat\u2019s when I knew that there was a deeper story to be told about [breathing], watching these people do this thing that is supposed to be impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018I love that energy\u2019 \u2026 <\/span> Composite: Guardian Design; Cravetiger\/Getty Images<\/p>\n His interest in breath wasn\u2019t about becoming superhuman. \u201cI think just being able to breathe normally is something so few people do, and that sounds crazy until you look at the stats, and you start counting how many people have asthma, they snore, have sleep apnoea.\u201d<\/p>\n Nestor calls breathing the missing pillar of health. We know the importance of diet, exercise and sleep, but breath, he says, tends to get ignored. What does good breathing look like or feel like? \u201cYou don\u2019t see it. It is subtle, soft. You don\u2019t see it in the chest, in the shoulders. You don\u2019t see any wincing in the face. The mouth is closed. If you look at a monk meditating, it\u2019s a beautiful thing. It\u2019s silent, clean. There should be no sound from your breathing, and no movement other than a slight expansion in the abdominal area. What does it feel like? It feels like your body is able to operate at peak efficiency.\u201d Most people breathe \u201cinto\u201d their chests, he says, rather than their belly (you can test by placing your hand on your abdomen when you inhale). \u201cIt\u2019s extremely inefficient, and it\u2019s also sending messages to your brain that you are stressed, and creates a vicious cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n Slow breathing appears to have benefits, including calming the nervous system. Nestor writes about \u201cresonant\u201d or \u201ccoherent\u201d breathing: a pattern of a 5.5 second inhale and 5.5 second exhale, which is also almost exactly 5.5 breaths a minute. Ancient cultures as diverse as Buddhists and Native Americans were on to this, Nestor writes, with chants and prayer cycles following this pattern.<\/p>\n What about the benefits, or potential pitfalls, of deep breathing? I\u2019m confused by Nestor\u2019s findings. \u201cYou should be,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re going to hear different things from different breathworkers. I believe that a slow, deep breath is extremely beneficial for the body, for blood pressure, for the nervous system and more. Some people in Buteyko schools [a method to regulate overbreathing] never take a deep breath \u2013 it\u2019s always very light. I don\u2019t really agree with that. I think we have this physiology; we\u2019re built to take a deep breath, as long as it\u2019s in tune with whatever we\u2019re doing. You\u2019re just reminding yourself of what you\u2019re already built to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike diet, sleep and exercise, we ignore breathing because it doesn\u2019t depend on us taking much notice of it. But we should, and we used to, says Nestor. Breathing was part of spirituality. \u201cYou can go into any ancient culture, from the Greeks to Hebrews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Chinese \u2013 I can go on and on \u2013 and breathing was foundational to their health. It\u2019s only in the industrial era, in the past few hundred years in the west, that we\u2019ve started ignoring it, just like we started ignoring our diet, eating industrialised foods.\u201d<\/p>\n And that food \u2013 the soft, processed, easy-to-eat kind \u2013 has changed the shapes of our skulls, according to researchers. Without having to chew on tough meat, raw vegetables and whole foods (and with fewer babies getting the jaw workout that breastfeeding promotes), modern human jaws are not developing as our ancestors\u2019 did, or those in more traditional societies.<\/p>\n <\/span>Have we forgotten how to breathe properly in the west?<\/span> Illustration: Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cThis was one of the most revelatory things I found late in my research, which is why I had to go back and redo everything,\u201d says Nestor. (It was what took him to those catacombs in Paris.) \u201cAll you have to do is look at ancient skulls. They have straight teeth. They look like a different species. I have crooked teeth, [wore] braces, had [tooth] extractions \u2013 everyone I know did, too. You start questioning: how did this happen? Most people have crooked teeth. No other animal on Earth has chronically crooked teeth. It absolutely affects how you breathe, because crooked teeth are a sign that your mouth is too small. And if that mouth is too small for teeth, it\u2019s going to be too small to breathe easily and freely.\u201d<\/p>\n If I gave my children a bone to gnaw on every day, would they develop better facial structures, and breathe easily throughout their lives? Nestor smiles. Maybe not a bone, he says. \u201cBut better habits, 100%.\u201d He wore a palate-expanding device, similar to a retainer, every night for a year. \u201cNot a pleasant thing to do, [but] it absolutely changed me. It opened up my airways. I built new bone in my face.\u201d Nestor suggests that early interventions such as myofunctional therapy \u2013 which uses exercises to retrain the muscles in the face, especially the tongue \u2013 could work, but this is still considered by the NHS to be an alternative therapy and lacks good evidence as a treatment for sleep apnoea.<\/p>\n Many of the people Nestor writes about in his book are a little eccentric, to say the least. There\u2019s Carl Stough, a choirmaster who started treating emphysema patients in the 50s and went on to coach the US Olympic running team, but whose strange bodily manipulations and breathing exercises died with him. Or the Swedish breathing researcher Anders Olsson, who huffs carbon dioxide from a tank.<\/p>\n Nestor visited the late orthodontist John Mew at his self-built castle in East Sussex, and his son Mike, also an orthodontist but more famously a social media star whose \u201cmewing\u201d videos \u2013 in which people are encouraged to stick their tongue to their upper palate, claiming it will improve face shape \u2013 have been watched by millions. In November 2024, Mike Mew was suspended from the dentists\u2019 register for inappropriate treatment of two child patients and making misleading claims on YouTube, which he is appealing.<\/p>\n This is before we even start thinking about the breathwork practitioners who promise cures for everything, or a higher state of consciousness. Why does this field seem to attract fairly fringe people?<\/p>\n \u201cMost started off on a very traditional path, and then they started piecing together that things weren\u2019t quite right, and then they shift gears. If you look at [orthodontist and researcher] Marianna Evans, she was a traditional dentist, and then things just weren\u2019t adding up for her.\u201d The dentistry that took off in the 70s and 80s \u2013 which Nestor and his peers received \u2013 was about extracting teeth to accommodate others. \u201cShouldn\u2019t we be expanding [their mouths]? Maybe she\u2019s considered fringe, but I don\u2019t think so any more.\u201d The Mews, he acknowledges, are fringe: \u201c100%, and it has less to do with what they\u2019re promoting and [more] how they\u2019re promoting it.\u201d<\/p>\n Olsson, his friend and fellow \u201cpulmonaut\u201d, to use Nestor\u2019s word, is a \u201cbit fringe-y\u201d, too. \u201cHe\u2019s more an experimenter, along with me. But the vast majority of the actual researchers and doctors in that book are people who are very much a part of the medical community and started seeing things in a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n The growing popularity of breathwork is still associated with esoteric thinking. \u201cWhich is fine if people are into that,\u201d Nestor says. He prefers to think of it as \u201cyour body being allowed to do what it\u2019s naturally designed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor is available now (Penguin Life, \u00a310.99)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the last stages of writing his book, Breath, James Nestor was stressed. \u201cWhich was ironic when writing a book about breathing patterns and mellowing out,\u201d he says. The book was late; he\u2019d spent his advance and was haemorrhaging even more money on extra research that was taking him off in new, potentially interesting, directions<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[14994,22090,4311,37,817,22089,22088,9464],"class_list":{"0":"post-41479","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-bestseller","9":"tag-breathing","10":"tag-copy","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-james","13":"tag-nestor","14":"tag-pulmonaut","15":"tag-turned"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span> Photograph: Mariia Vitkovska\/Getty Images<\/p>\n