"Breath"

[fiefoe]

James Nestor's book does make me realize why I so often feel out of breath during parties -- because all that talking and mouth-breathing.

• This work was upending long-held beliefs in Western medical science. Yes, breathing in different patterns really can influence our body weight and overall health. Yes, how we breathe really does affect the size and function of our lungs. Yes, breathing allows us to hack into our own nervous system, control our immune response, and restore our health. Yes, changing how we breathe will help us live longer... The missing pillar in health is breath.
• Many early pioneers in this discipline weren’t scientists. They were tinkerers, a kind of rogue group I call “pulmonauts,” who stumbled on the powers of breathing because nothing else could help them. They were Civil War surgeons, French hairdressers, anarchist opera singers, Indian mystics, irritable swim coaches, stern-faced Ukrainian cardiologists, Czechoslovakian Olympians, and North Carolina choral conductors.
• Forty percent of today’s population suffers from chronic nasal obstruction, and around half of us are habitual mouthbreathers, with females and children suffering the most.
• When mouths don’t grow wide enough, the roof of the mouth tends to rise up instead of out, forming what’s called a V-shape or high-arched palate. The upward growth impedes the development of the nasal cavity, shrinking it and disrupting the delicate structures in the nose. The reduced nasal space leads to obstruction and inhibits airflow. Overall, humans have the sad distinction of being the most plugged-up species on Earth.
• Oxygen, it turned out, produced 16 times more energy than carbon dioxide. Aerobic life forms used this boost to evolve, to leave the sludge-covered rocks behind and grow larger and more complex. They crawled up to land, dove deep into the sea, and flew into the air. They became plants, trees, birds, bees, and the earliest mammals.
• The problem was that this smaller, vertically positioned nose was less efficient at filtering air, and it exposed us to more airborne pathogens and bacteria. The smaller sinuses and mouth also reduced space in our throats. The more we cooked, the more soft, calorie-rich food we consumed, the larger our brains grew and the tighter our airways became.
• The problem was that this smaller, vertically positioned nose was less efficient at filtering air, and it exposed us to more airborne pathogens and bacteria. The smaller sinuses and mouth also reduced space in our throats. The more we cooked, the more soft, calorie-rich food we consumed, the larger our brains grew and the tighter our airways became... A lack of vasopressin explains not only my own irritable bladder but the constant, seemingly unquenchable thirst I have every night.
• What researchers eventually managed to confirm was that nasal erectile tissue mirrored states of health. It would become inflamed during sickness or other states of imbalance. If the nose became infected, the nasal cycle became more pronounced and switched back and forth quickly. The right and left nasal cavities also worked like an HVAC system, controlling temperature and blood pressure and feeding the brain chemicals to alter our moods, emotions, and sleep states.
• The right nostril is a gas pedal... Breathing through the right nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain, specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical decisions, language, and computing. <> Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect: it works as a kind of brake system to the right nostril’s accelerator. The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers temperature and blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety.
• Our bodies operate most efficiently in a state of balance, pivoting between action and relaxation, daydreaming and reasoned thought. This balance is influenced by the nasal cycle, and may even be controlled by it. It’s a balance that can also be gamed.
  There’s a yoga practice dedicated to manipulating the body’s functions with forced breathing through the nostrils. It’s called nadi shodhana—in Sanskrit, nadi means “channel” and shodhana means “purification”—or, more commonly, alternate nostril breathing.
• Our bodies operate most efficiently in a state of balance, pivoting between action and relaxation, daydreaming and reasoned thought. This balance is influenced by the nasal cycle, and may even be controlled by it. It’s a balance that can also be gamed.
• Along the banks of the Upper Missouri, he happened upon the civilization of the Mandan, a mysterious tribe whose members stood six feet tall and lived in bubble-shaped houses. Many had luminous blue eyes and snow-white hair.
  Catlin... would paint some 600 portraits and take hundreds of pages of notes, forming what famed author Peter Matthiessen would call “the first, last, and only complete record ever made of the Plains Indians at the height of their splendid culture.”
• Twenty years after Catlin explored the West, he set off again, at age 56, to live with indigenous cultures in the Andes, Argentina, and Brazil. He wanted to know if “medicinal” breathing practices extended beyond the Plains. They did. Every tribe Catlin visited over the next several years—dozens of them—shared the same breathing habits. It was no coincidence, he reported, that they also shared the same vigorous health, perfect teeth, and forward-growing facial structure.
• He told me that mouthbreathing contributed to periodontal disease and bad breath, and was the number one cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene. (This belief had been echoed by other dentists for a hundred years, and was endorsed by Catlin too.) Burhenne also found that mouthbreathing was both a cause of and a contributor to snoring and sleep apnea. He recommended his patients tape their mouths shut at night.
• The sa ta na ma chant, one of the best-known techniques in Kundalini yoga, also takes six seconds to vocalize, followed by six seconds to inhale. Then there were the ancient Hindu hand and tongue poses called mudras. A technique called khechari, intended to help boost physical and spiritual health and overcome disease, involves placing the tongue above the soft palate so that it’s pointed toward the nasal cavity. The deep, slow breaths taken during this khechari each take six seconds. Japanese, African, Hawaiian, Native American, Buddhist, Taoist, Christian—these cultures and religions all had somehow developed the same prayer techniques, requiring the same breathing patterns. And they all likely benefited from the same calming effect.
• It turned out that the most efficient breathing rhythm occurred when both the length of respirations and total breaths per minute were locked in to a spooky symmetry: 5.5-second inhales followed by 5.5-second exhales, which works out almost exactly to 5.5 breaths a minute. This was the same pattern of the rosary.
• What’s considered medically normal today is anywhere between a dozen and 20 breaths a minute, with an average intake of about half a liter per breath. For those on the high end of respiratory rates, that’s about twice as much as it was.*
  One thing that every medical or freelance pulmonaut I’ve talked to over the past several years has agreed on is that, just as we’ve become a culture of overeaters, we’ve also become a culture of overbreathers. Most of us breathe too much, and up to a quarter of the modern population suffers from more serious chronic overbreathing.
• When we stray from that, the body will do whatever it can to get us back there. The kidneys, for instance, will respond to overbreathing by “buffering,”* a process in which an alkaline compound called bicarbonate is released into the urine. With less bicarbonate in the blood, the pH lowers back to normal, even if we continue to huff and puff. It’s as if nothing ever happened.
  The problem with buffering is that it’s meant as a temporary fix, not a permanent solution. Weeks, months, or years of overbreathing, and this constant kidney (renal) buffering will deplete the body of essential minerals. This occurs because as bicarbonate leaves the body, it takes magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and more with it. Without healthy stores of these minerals, nothing works right: nerves malfunction, smooth muscles spasm, and cells can’t efficiently create energy. Breathing becomes even more difficult. This is one reason why asthmatics and other people with chronic respiratory problems are prescribed supplements like magnesium to stave off further attacks.
  Constant buffering also weakens the bones, which try to compensate by dissolving their mineral stores back into the bloodstream. (Yes, it’s possible to overbreathe yourself into osteoporosis and increased risk of bone fractures.) This unending grind of imbalances and compensations, of deficiencies and strain, will eventually break the body down.
• The techniques they used varied, but all circled around the same premise: to extend the length of time between inhalations and exhalations. The less one breathes, the more one absorbs the warming touch of respiratory efficiency—and the further a body can go.
  This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Nature functions in orders of magnitude. Mammals with the lowest resting heart rates live the longest. And it’s no coincidence that these are consistently the same mammals that breathe the slowest. The only way to retain a slow resting heart rate is with slow breaths.
• Societies that replaced their traditional diet with modern, processed foods suffered up to ten times more cavities, severely crooked teeth, obstructed airways, and overall poorer health. The modern diets were the same: white flour, white rice, jams, sweetened juices, canned vegetables, and processed meats.
• “In ten years, nobody will be using traditional orthodontics,” Gelb told me. “We’ll look back at what we’ve done and be horrified.” This is what Mew had been saying for the past half century. The rebellion within orthodontics eventually led to the formation of a professional organization called the Academy of Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy. <>  This group, I’d learned, is much more interested in fixing the problem of undersize mouths than blaming those who contributed to it.
• He explained that the first step to improving airway obstruction wasn’t orthodontics but instead involved maintaining correct “oral posture.” Anyone could do this, and it was free.
  It just meant holding the lips together, teeth lightly touching, with your tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck. When sitting or standing, the spine should form a J-shape—perfectly straight until it reaches the small of the back, where it naturally curves outward. While maintaining this posture, we should always breathe slowly through the nose into the abdomen.
• Mike’s own instructional video on mewing has been viewed a million times.
  It’s difficult to convey mewing without seeing it, but the gist is to push the back of the tongue against the back roof of the mouth and move the rest of the tongue forward, like a wave, until the tip hits just behind the front teeth. I tried it a few times. It felt awkward, like I was holding back vomit.
• Chewing. The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe.
  It starts at infancy. The chewing and sucking stress required for breastfeeding exercises the masseter and other facial muscles and stimulates more stem cell growth, stronger bones, and more pronounced airways.
• The chew-airway connection, like so much else breath-related, was old news. As I dug through a century of scientific papers on the subject over several months, I felt like I was trapped in a respiratory research Groundhog Day. Different scientists, different decades; the same conclusions, the same collective amnesia.
  “An early soft diet prevents the development of the muscle fibers of the tongue,” he wrote more than a century ago, “resulting in a weaker tongue which [cannot] drive the primary dentition out into a spaced relationship with fully developed arches which will lead to more crowding of the permanent teeth.”
• They influence nearly every internal organ, telling them when to turn on and off. They affect heart rate, digestion, moods, attitudes; when we feel aroused, and when we feel nauseated. Breathing is a power switch to a vast network called the autonomic nervous system.
• This was supposed to be biologically impossible. The autonomic nervous system, per its definition, was supposed to be autonomic, as in automatic, as in beyond our control. And for the past hundred years or so, this belief has held. In much of medicine, it still holds today.
  When Alexandra David-Néel finally returned to Paris and wrote about Tummo and other Buddhist breathing techniques and meditations in her 1927 book, My Journey to Lhasa, few doctors and medical researchers believed the stories. Few could accept that breathing alone could keep a body warm in freezing temperatures. Fewer believed it could control immune function and heal diseases.
• At one point, they injected his arm with an endotoxin, a component of E. coli. Exposure to the bacteria usually induces vomiting, headaches, fever, and other flu-like symptoms. Hof took the E. coli into his veins and then breathed a few dozen Tummo breaths, willing his body to fight it off. He showed no sign of fever, no nausea.
• That changes when we breathe heavily. Whenever the body is forced to take in more air than it needs, we’ll exhale too much carbon dioxide, which will narrow the blood vessels and decrease circulation, especially in the brain. With just a few minutes, or even seconds, of overbreathing, brain blood flow can decrease by 40 percent, an incredible amount.
• The areas most affected by this are the brain’s hippocampus and frontal, occipital, and parieto-occipital cortices, which, together, govern functions such as visual processing, body sensory information, memory, the experience of time, and the sense of self. Disturbances in these areas can elicit powerful hallucinations, which include out-of-body experiences and waking dreams. If we keep breathing a little faster and deeper, more blood will drain from the brain, and the visual and auditory hallucinations will become more profound.
• A single puff of carbon dioxide did to S. M. what no snakes, horror movies, or thunderstorms could. For the first time in 30 years, she’d felt fear, a full-fledged panic attack. Her amygdalae hadn’t grown back. Her brain was the same as it had always been. But some dormant switch had suddenly been flipped.
  S. M. refused to inhale carbon dioxide again. Years later, the mere idea of it stressed her out. So Feinstein and his researchers confirmed the results with two German twins who also suffered from Urbach-Wiethe disease. The twins had lost their amygdalae, and neither had felt fear in a decade. A single inhalation of carbon dioxide quickly changed that when both suffered the same debilitating anxiety, panic, and crushing fear as S. M.
  The textbooks were wrong. The amygdalae were not the only “alarm circuit of fear.” There was another, deeper circuit in our bodies that was generating perhaps a more powerful sense of danger than anything the amygdalae alone could muster.
• Sometimes we won’t breathe at all for a half minute or longer. The problem is serious enough that the National Institutes of Health has enlisted several researchers, including Dr. David Anderson and Dr. Margaret Chesney, to study its effects over the past decades. Chesney told me that the habit, also known as “email apnea,” can contribute to the same maladies as sleep apnea.

SHUT YOUR MOUTH/BREATHE THROUGH YOUR NOSE/EXHALE/CHEW/BREATHE MORE, ON OCCASION/HOLD YOUR BREATH

As basic as this sounds, full exhalations are seldom practiced. Most of us engage only a small fraction of our total lung capacity with each breath, requiring us to do more and get less. One of the first steps in healthy breathing is to extend these breaths, to move the diaphragm up and down a bit more, and to get air out of us before taking a new one in.

BREATHING METHODS:
* ALTERNATE NOSTRIL BREATHING (NADI SHODHANA)

* BREATHING COORDINATION
Take a gentle breath in through the nose. At the top of the breath begin counting softly aloud from one to 10 over and over (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10).
As you reach the natural conclusion of the exhale, keep counting but do so in a whisper, letting the voice softly trail out. Then keep going until only the lips are moving and the lungs feel completely empty.

* RESONANT (COHERENT) BREATHING
Inhale softly for 5.5 seconds, expanding the belly as air fills the bottom of the lungs.
Without pausing, exhale softly for 5.5 seconds, bringing the belly in as the lungs empty. Each breath should feel like a circle.
Repeat at least ten times, more if possible.

* BUTEYKO BREATHING
Exhale gently and hold the breath for half the time of the Control Pause. (For instance, if the Control Pause is 40 seconds, the Mini Breathhold would be 20.)
Repeat from 100 to 500 times a day.

* Nose Songs
Breathe normally through the nose and hum, any song or sound.
Practice for at least five minutes a day, more if possible.

* Decongest the Nose
Sit up straight and exhale a soft breath, then pinch both nostrils shut.
Try to keep your mind off the breathholding; shake your head up and down or side to side; go for a quick walk, or jump and run.
Once you feel a very potent sense of air hunger, take a very slow and controlled breath in through the nose. (If the nose is still congested, breathe softly through the mouth with pursed lips.)
Continue this calm, controlled breathing for at least 30 seconds to 1 minute.
Repeat all these steps six times.