For years, I've been focused on the most basic human activity there is: breathing. After all, watching your breath is the main activity in meditation, something I'm so gung-ho about that I started an annual high-tech meditation contest. Dr. Andrew Weil's famous relaxation breathing exercise — inhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 7, exhale for a count of 8 — helped me to sleep on anxious nights for nearly two decades. The Core meditation trainer introduced me to other breathing techniques for calm, energy, and focus. I thought I had a pretty good handle on this thing our lungs do multiple times a minute.
Then I read Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by journalist James Nestor, and discovered I knew next to nothing about the subject. I'd been breathing, and thinking about breathing, all wrong. Nestor's book, one of the more surprising nonfiction hits of 2020, ties together a growing scientific movement with ancient wisdom that confirms it. Both point to the same glaring fact: We in the developed world have forgotten how to breathe. Instead of using its phenomenal power to heal, we're breathing in ways that do harm.
Breath was only the beginning of my journey down the rabbit hole of respiratory research. There I inhaled other books on this fast-expanding frontier, most notably The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown. He's a former student of Konstantin Buteyko, a Soviet doctor who pioneered a method of breathing now used around the world to help treat asthma and other respiratory disorders; McKeown's book is much more of a how-to that helps you incrementally improve breathing health.
The advice wasn't hot air. After several weeks of following it, I'm having better quality sleep (even as the number of hours I slept went down thanks to the never-ending election of 2020). My average blood pressure has dropped, as has my weight, and I am running my daily 5K roughly 10 minutes faster than I did before. How, you ask? Let me walk you through the main life-changing revelations — the most important of which is extremely counterintuitive.
1. Get more CO2.
Carbon dioxide is, of course, hugely damaging to the health of the planet in the quantities emitted by human industry. It can also be dangerous to our bodies if inhaled in too large a dose. Take a few breaths of pure CO2 in a lab, and your brain will immediately freak out as if it's being suffocated.
Weirdly, however, increasing the amount of CO2 in your lungs by a tolerable amount is actually one of the best things you can do to get more oxygen into your blood — more so than inhaling pure oxygen, which doesn't do a thing. In a healthy body, blood oxygen levels are somewhere between 95 and 99 percent; we've already got all the oxygen in our hemoglobin that our bodies need. The only way to get us to absorb more is to add CO2, which lowers the pH levels in your blood, which is the only thing that dislodges oxygen molecules from hemoglobin and delivers it to hungry cells.
This isn't new information. It's called the Bohr effect, discovered by Danish scientist Christian Bohr in 1904. The effect has since been observed in every size of mammal, from guinea pigs to humpback whales. "Carbon dioxide works as a kind of divorce lawyer," Nestor says, "a go-between to separate oxygen from its ties so it can be free to land another mate."
It's the ramifications that are hard to accept: We simply need to breathe more slowly. If you're gasping for air in quick, panicky breaths, all you are doing is purging CO2 from your system. "When we breathe correctly, we have a sufficient amount of carbon dioxide, and our breathing is quiet, controlled, and rhythmic," McKeown writes. "If we are overbreathing, our breathing is heavy, more intense, and erratic, and we exhale too much carbon dioxide, leaving our body literally gasping for oxygen."
The more you practice calm and slow breathing routines that increase CO2, the more of it you should be able to handle, making every kind of exercise easier and panic attacks less likely. (As one scientist tells Nestor, "'take a deep breath' is not a helpful instruction"; take a slow, gentle breath would be closer to the mark.) And while full breaths of CO2 in the lab may overwhelm your brain, new research proposes that taking it in larger gulps than normal — from air tanks containing up to 35 percent CO2 —may help patients with anxiety disorders, epilepsy, and maybe even asthma.
2. Tape your damn mouth shut.
For the past few weeks, just before I turn out the light, I've followed this unusual bedtime routine. I tear off a small strip of surgical tape, about half the size of a postage stamp, and stick it on the middle of my lips. This took a while to get right, and during the first two nights I managed to take the tape off in my sleep. But now I'm used to it, I awake more refreshed than I've felt in decades.
The point of the tape is to make you breathe via your nose throughout the night. Mouth breathing is the number one way we expel too much carbon dioxide. You may not think of yourself as a mouth breather, but chances are that you are doing it unawares while sleeping, like I was. Research has linked mouth breathing to sleep apnea, snoring, gum disease and tooth decay, and bad breath. It even changes the shape of your face over time, weakening your jawline. (The good news is you can change it back.)
In Breathe, Nestor conducts a terrifying experiment on himself to prove just how unhealthy mouth breathing is. With the help of experts at Stanford, he blocks his nostrils for 10 days. His sleep is a disaster. His blood pressure skyrockets. He gains weight. Luckily, the next phase of the experiment — nasal breathing for the same amount of time — reverses all the bad metrics and then some.
And if your nasal passages are just too blocked up? Well, when nose breathing is its only option, the body has ways to clear up your sinuses in a hurry. In The Oxygen Advantage, McKeown has a breathing exercise that worked for me. Exhale, then hold your nose and close your mouth while walking for as many steps as you comfortably can. Go back to normal breathing, then do it again a minute or two later. Repeat six times. Over time, he says, you should be able to get the number of steps while holding your breath up to 60 — and your nasal passages should be clean as a whistle.
3. Know that the nose knows.
What's so great about nasal breathing? First of all, it regulates your intake so that the whole CO2 thing is less of a problem. Secondly, breaths that come via the sinuses release a large dose of nitric oxide — a gas that we've only just begun to learn about, but one that increases circulation, boosts your immune system and even plays a role in sexual function (nitric oxide is the active ingredient in Viagra).
There's evidence to suggest older human cultures intuitively understand the importance of nose breathing. According to an artist who studied Native American tribes in the 1860s, mothers would pinch their babies' lips shut after eating and while sleeping, making it a habit. (The title of the book that artist wrote decades later, noting how healthy the tribes were as a result: Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life.) Yoga was an Indian breathing practice before it was a workout, and it was done through the nose. Taoists called the nose the "heavenly door." And your parents may well have passed down the proverb that "the nose is for breathing, the mouth is for eating."
They were right. If you need more proof, look at the rest of the animal kingdom. Horses breathe through their noses even at full gallop. So does every other running creature. Your dog may pant through his mouth when hot, but at all other times his snout is designed to take in all the air he needs. Your nose is also bigger than you think. The whole area above the roof of your mouth is part of its cavernous internal structure. We were born to use it.
4. Breathe nice and slow...
"Breathing is like rowing a boat," Nestor says. "Taking a zillion short and stilted strokes will get you where you're going, but they pale in comparison to the efficiency and speed of fewer, longer strokes."
How slow, exactly? Turns out there's an optimal pace: 5.5 seconds in, 5.5 seconds out, for just under six breaths per minute. (If you've got an Apple Watch, you can set the "Breathe" app to this, the slowest setting.) This corresponds to peak efficiency of blood flow in the brain and heart. One study of 9/11 survivors with chronic lung conditions showed a few rounds of breathing around this 5.5 second pace every day — which the scientists involved call "resonant" or "coherent" breathing — led to a significant improvement in their health. (They also say that if you can't do 5.5 second inhales yet, start with 3 seconds.)
Optimal breathing is something we seem to have learned over human history too, reinforced in our sacred ceremonies. Buddhists chant Om for about six seconds, then inhale for six seconds. When Italian researchers timed how much Catholics breathe during the prayer cycle of the Ave Maria, they pegged it at roughly 5.5 breaths per minute. Hindu, Taoist and Native American prayers all seem to yield the same result.
It's not really the number of seconds that's key, however, so much as the amount of air you're taking in during that breath. Helpfully, the ideal amount is also easy to remember: It's 5.5 liters. McKeown feels that timing your breaths is a distraction from making sure each one is so slow-motion as to be barely perceptible. This doesn't mean your breaths should be shallow — your diaphragm should still be fully engaged — but you shouldn't really be able to see your breath rise and fall, much less hear it. The one point that stuck in my brain: In tai chi tournaments, the judges deduct points if they can see the competitors breathing.
"If you want to learn what constitutes good breathing," McKeown says, "observe the breathing of a baby or a healthy pet, whose breathing has not been altered by the effects of modern lifestyles."
5. ... even when exercising.
Can you imagine going for a run while breathing through your nose at a pace as close to 5 breaths per minute as possible? I certainly couldn't. After all, I'd only recently returned to running every day as a way to cope with the stresses of 2020. But it turned out to be easier than I expected — so long as I simply shut my mouth and didn't pay much attention to my breathing. (When I did, my heart would leap with a panicky sensation — oh my god, aren't you supposed to breathe more? — and a lifetime's habit of breathing fast while exercising would kick in.)
As it turns out, however, simply switching to nose breathing was enough to give my daily 5K a significant speed jolt. I was averaging more than 40 minutes the week before trying the new technique; the week after, they were all in the 30-minute range. This meant I was doing even better than Nestor, who experienced a slower pace and a slight headache the first time he switched to nose-breathing runs. Apparently this is common; it's also what happens in altitude training, which is simply another way to make your body work more efficiently with a lower intake of air.
The other advantage of nose-breathing while exercising is that it's self-regulating. "You won't be able to do it if you are either running too fast, not relaxed enough, or inefficient in your movement," says Danny Dreyer, an ultramarathoner who invented a light-and-easy method he calls Chi Running. If you need to breathe through your mouth, it's your body telling you to slow the hell down. So do so, walk or stop if necessary, and try and get your breathing back to a calm, slow and nasal state in as few breaths as possible.
6. Don't dive in too fast.
There's a whole world of breathing experiments out there beyond these two books, and many are on the extreme end of the spectrum. Newly on the shelves is The Wim Hof Method, the first book by the eponymous fiftysomething Dutch athlete who runs ultramarathons in the Arctic snow. Hof advocates significant shocks to the system to boost your resilience: alternating fast breaths with breath-holding and exposing yourself to cold as much as possible.
But just as you shouldn't run before you can walk, you need to give your body time to catch up before putting it under these kinds of stress (and you should, of course, talk to your health professionals about any change in your regimen). McKeown is a firm believer in the power of breath-holding, but his whole book is tailored around what he calls your BOLT (Body Oxygen Level Test) score — basically, how many seconds you can hold your breath while still comfortable. The lower your BOLT, the more you are advised to take the program easy. The whole point is to slowly raise it over time.
In other words, if you're trying to change everything at once before your body's ready, you may want to stop and take a breath.
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