Change Your Breath, Change Your Life - James Nestor | Modern Wisdom Podcast 350

I want to be very clear, breathing is not going to fix all of your problems, right? But what I have found is that when people have very dysfunctional breathing, when you start controlling your breathing and you breathe in a more efficient way, the body can come back into balance. (wind blowing sound)

James, welcome to the show. How crazy has the last year been for you after your book came out? Because it feels like breathwork is everywhere at the moment.

Well, I think it was a crazy year for everybody for so many different reasons. I mean, you put a pandemic onto a virtual book tour, onto me finally coming out of my closet, uh, after so many years of research and writing to be on the other side of the mic, and it's been, uh, complete and utter chaos to- to put it mildly, but in all- almost all good ways. So, I'm very grateful for the attention, and I'm very grateful that people have discovered breathing as a way to help improve their health.

Yeah. And you talk about how these insights of breathing have been around for a very, very long time, you know, thousands and thousands of years, but aren't still now super widely known. Isn't it crazy in the 21st century that we can still have gated information, that there's stuff that monks in monasteries somewhere know, but that the internet doesn't?

Hmm. Well, I think that if you look at medicine, and if you look at so much of science, uh, this is exactly the pattern it takes, is, in one culture a group will discover something to be true, and then a- another culture where that group had no association with the previous group, they discovered the same exact thing. This is true with nutrition, it's true with exercise, and it's certainly true with breathing. So, it wasn't that surprising to see that we've had this huge blind spot, because we've had huge blind spots in regards to so many other things, so many other very basic things that have to do with human health.

Yeah, we saw that with Matthew Walker's book, right? The- why we sleep. W- wh- why should a book about something that everybody does for a third of their life be so revolutionary?

(laughs) I was just talking with Matthew Walker a couple of weeks ago. I was lucky enough to interview him, uh, at a conference, our first conference, uh, since the pandemic has somewhat lightened up here in the US, and I was cracking up because when I first heard of that book, I said, "You have to be kidding me. Oh, now some guy wants to teach me how to sleep. I sleep just fine." And then, we realized that breathing and sleeping, uh, both people expect them to be a default reaction, something that we don't need to think about. But then, you look at populations, across populations of- of people who are sleeping and people who are breathing dysfunctionally, and there is an epidemic going on- on- on both of those fronts. And there's a lot of crossover that- that Venn diagram between disordered sleeping and disordered breathing. And so, uh, you know, these simple things, I think, get so ignored because they're so simple, and yet just adopting the most basic, simple human habits can really enrich your- your life and i- on so many levels, and the science is very clear about that.