If You Breathe Like This, Don’t Ignore It- It’s Costing You Your Sleep, Brain & Health: James Nestor

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   I wonder if we could start off by addressing the skeptic, the person who thinks, "What's the big deal with breathing and breathwork? You know, I'm alive. I'm breathing. Why should I care how slow my breathing is, how deep my breathing is? Why will that help me improve the quality of my life?"

2. JNJames Nestor0:18

   Mm-hmm. By nature, I am a skeptic. That's what I'm paid to do as a journalist, so I went into this subject not believing anything that I ended up researching and writing about. But what's so easy about breathing is you can feel the effects almost instantly. After a few seconds, you can feel the effects. And if you think what you're feeling is a placebo effect, all you have to do is hook yourself up to a blood pressure cuff or a heart rate variability real-time monitor-

3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:52

   Mm-hmm

4. JNJames Nestor0:52

   ... and you can see in real time how changing your breathing changes your nervous system, changes your oxygenation, changes your heart rate, and so much more, and that's what convinced me is, was being in a lab and changing my breathing in five different ways and seeing the transformative effect it had on my body and my brain.

5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:13

   Yeah. And I do understand where skepticism comes from-

6. JNJames Nestor1:18

   Mm-hmm

7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:18

   ... because we can all breathe, right? If someone's listening to this podcast right now, they're breathing.

8. JNJames Nestor1:24

   Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:24

   Right? So that's not really up for debate, is it? It's basically how are you breathing.

10. JNJames Nestor1:30

    Yeah. Well, I think, uh, I, I've heard that a few times of like, "We, we can all breathe. What, what's the issue?" We can all eat. We can all sleep. That doesn't mean you're sleeping well, and that doesn't mean you're eating well. So you can eat junk food, ultra-processed foods, and that can keep you alive. That allows you enough energy to get by to the next day. You can sleep hypothetically three to four hours a night, and you will be alive, but that doesn't mean you're doing well, and that doesn't mean you're being healthy, and we found the exact same thing happens with breathing. People are locked into these dysfunctional habits that they think are normal, and they don't realize that how they are breathing is directly affecting the level of migraines or headaches they get. It's affecting their blood pressure. For some people with sleep apnea and sleep-disordered breathing, it's affecting their risk of diabetes and heart disease later on in life. So we know all this. I'm not making this up. These aren't hypotheses. These are scientific facts.

11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:32

    Yeah, it's interesting. As a medical doctor-

12. JNJames Nestor2:35

    Mm-hmm

13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:37

    ... we're not really taught that much about the breath. Certainly the things you write about in your book, we're not really taught about these things. You know, we, we think about oxygen saturations dropping if someone's severely ill.

14. JNJames Nestor2:52

    Mm-hmm.

15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:52

    Like they've got a pneumonia, they're struggling to breathe. They've got emphysema, whatever it might be. We're gonna look at their oxygen saturations and their respiratory rates at that point. But that, I guess, is reflective of where modern medicine is today, right?

16. JNJames Nestor3:09

    Mm-hmm.

17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:09

    We're, we sort of are very good at managing disease.

18. JNJames Nestor3:13

    Mm-hmm.

19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:13

    I guess we're less good on the creation of health.

20. JNJames Nestor3:17

    A pulmonologist is solely interested that you are breathing. So a pulmonologist makes sure that you are breathing. They're not looking at how you are breathing. And you know, if you look at what pulmonology does, they're looking at lung cancers, that you get in a car accident. They're, they're restoring the lungs so that you can breathe. I asked this pulmonologist, I said, "Well, when a patient comes in and is breathing dysfunctionally, w- what do you do? What's your go-to technique?" And he looked at me like I was crazy. He's like, "I don't teach breathwork. [chuckles] That's not something I do." I said, "But your discipline is the lungs. That's your lane." He said, "Because I'm just concerned that, that people are breathing." And if you come to the emergency room or you come to his office and you can't breathe, he can help you. If you come with a mild chronic, uh, breathing respiratory condition, it's much harder for them to help you. So I've heard this from sleep medicine as well as pulmonologists, that they deal with the walking dead, right?

21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:22

    Mm-hmm.

22. JNJames Nestor4:22

    You have to be so bad in order to get their attention and care, and then they're really good at what they do to help someone in a car accident with lung cancer, right? To, to restore that ability to breathe, not how to breathe.

23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:35

    Yeah. It's interesting when we think about how we might utilize breathwork in our lives-

24. JNJames Nestor4:41

    Mm-hmm

25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:41

    ... to improve our health, how we feel, our energy. Through a medical lens, people will think about that as prevention, right? They'll th- they'll say, "Yeah, if I can improve this aspect of my physiology, that will help me reduce the chances of me getting sick in the future."

26. JNJames Nestor4:59

    Mm-hmm.

27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:59

    Which is absolutely true, and we're gonna talk about that.

28. JNJames Nestor5:04

    Mm-hmm.

29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:04

    But as you demonstrate in your book, it's not just prevention. You can also treat certain people who have got certain conditions by utilizing the breath. You mentioned high blood pressure before.

30. JNJames Nestor5:16

    Mm-hmm.

Episode duration: 2:15:52