Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

The gist of this popular science book is that although breathing is something we instinctively do 25,000 times per day, we've allegedly lost the art of how to breathe correctly. Nestor presents the evidence on what's changed through evolution, the potential grave consequences and what we can do about it.

Straight away Nestor cuts to the chase about mouth breathing, and apparently we've much more than bad breath and cavities to worry about. According to the research he's done, at best mouth breathing leads to increased stuffiness / infections in the nasal cavities, and at worst leads to hypertension and the metabolic and cognitive problems that come with sleep apnea. If you regularly get up in the middle of the night for a wee your mouth show more breathing could be to blame as it also affects kidney regulation.

It's not only breathing through the correct airway that improves our health but also how we breathe (5.5 seconds in and out is optimal, which is probably a lot less breaths per minute than most of us take) and, believe it or not, how we chew. Science has shown that man's change of diet in evolution to softer foods has decreased the size of our mouth cavities to a size which is sub-optimal for allowing room for our teeth and room for an effective airway system. Whilst not everyone is likely to queue up for the type of orthodontic 'widening' device that Nestor tries out (successfully, in terms of his overall sinus function), he provides detail on how new facial bone can be developed at any age through the regular use of certain hard gum (nasty habit - I struggled to get on board with that idea, although the science behind it sounds plausible).

I loved this book. It was interesting and written in a very engaging style, and I took a lot from it in terms of practices I want to start adopting.

4.5 stars - entertaining, fascinating and potentially life transformative. Recommended. show less

"Breath" has been a bestseller. Although it was written before the pandemic, it seems to have benefited from all the attention that has being going to breath and breathing in the period since.

Breath is an atheistic book. And by this, I mean that it is all about the "how," or the mechanisms, related to breathing. For example, Nestor cites studies that looked at the healing effects of prayer, and chalks this up to the fact that many prayers force us to breath more slowly. Although I'm sure this is the case, it is sort of missing the point. It is sort of like saying that raising a child is good exercise; missing the point that many of us care about the future of our children and the people they are becoming. In other words, it is a book show more that is oblivious to "effects," in the sense of holistic or systemic outcomes.

That said, being at least partially acculturated in a reductionistic Western world, I can't help but find all the benefits of good breathing that Nestor documents compelling. For example, I've been hearing friends tell me about [[Wim Hof]] for years, but I can't recall what purported benefits his breathing techniques proffer, except that maybe it has something to do with cold? Nestor explores Hof, what he's doing, and how it works.

The basics of the book are intuitive to me. As a child, I recall my father mentioning on many occasions to breath through my nose, and this is something I do, despite chronic mild congestion (which I've never quite been able to diagnose). I was taught various meditation techniques and breathing techniques, some of which are go-to practices for me.

What was most striking to me about this book was its emphasis on the importance of carbon dioxide in our blood, and its effects on metabolism and efficiency. Apparently carbon dioxide is just as essential as oxygen to the function of our cells, and for some reason, no one ever taught me this! A lot of the health benefits of good breathing are actually about higher levels of CO2 in our bloodstreams; not higher (or lower) levels of oxygen.

Although Nestor documents a number of ancient techniques, Dhikr is glaringly omitted. Dhikr, in the Islamic Sufi tradition, is the most remarkable breath technique in which I have participated. Most Dhikr are practiced in community (although a few can be practiced alone), and have a certain violence to them in their gait and fervor. They also have unequivocally consciousness-altering effects. I'm sure there are many other equally remarkable techniques from traditions of which I'm currently unaware.

At the level of storytelling, in the tradition of Michael Pollan, Nestor describes his research through his own story of self-exploration—including excruciating experiments that one wonders if he participated in simple for the shock value (such as blocking his nose with silicone plugs for ten days to try a state of forced mouth breathing). I notice a lot of authors using this style, and it is an easy way to make your work more relatable. Maybe it also grabs attention in a way that is required in our attention-fragmented current day (people put down less voyeuristic books).

To move into epistemology and pedagogy, unfortunately books are one of the poorer ways to teach people about breathing. As breath is such a somatic phenomenon, it is best taught person-to-person, in-person (which is what Nestor did throughout the book). Anyone that takes Nestor's jubilance to heart will need to find ways of actually getting out and practicing what is described in the book. show less

There is a lot of really fascinating information in this book! Unfortunately, the author tends to jump from topic to topic, and leave a lot of things unresolved. I get that he's trying to build a narrative and create some tension, but in an informational book like this, we don't really need a narrative or tension. The narrative he builds is about his own experience of using breath to cure some lifelong health problems and improve his general health. To build tension, he jumps between telling his own story, and telling the stories of how scientists learned what we currently know about breath. Frustratingly, he has a habit to leave some of these stories unfinished. For instance, there's a fascinating section about a yoga guru who could show more control his heart rate and body temperature with his breath. Nestor describes how scientists hooked this man up to a bunch of measuring equipment and made him do his tricks... but then never tells us what scientists learned from these experiments. There are several other unresolved stories like that.

However, the information about breathing and breath is really fascinating. But maybe I should have just skipped to the end and read the section that describes all the breathing exercises and their benefits. show less

One “litmus test” I use for gauging the value of a nonfiction book can be boiled down to one question: Did it spur me to think about something that I previously gave little or no thought to. “Breath” passed this test with flying colors.
I learned so much about a vital function that most of us take for granted. The author aptly bills it as an adventure into the lost art of breathing. In an engaging, non-jargon filled way, Nestor demonstrates how making simple changes in the way we breathe can improve our health, create a healthier mindset and help us live longer. The book even includes simple exercises for improving breathing patterns. I’ve tried it several times, then checked my blood pressure. The exercises seem to work!

He puts forth hypotheses that are easy enough to test whether they make any particular kind of difference in my individual life, so I figure why not just test them? In this way the book is memetic. If I’m trying out old gum and taping my mouth shut, I’m probably going to talk about it with other people, which invites the question: what the fuck are you doing that for? Fair.

The chewing thing makes sense, that mastication would lead to bone growth in the maxillas, which could—__could__—help my sinus issues. Same for the sleeping with my mouth shut. My childhood experience with sinus infections, getting an allergy to an antibiotic because of overuse, chest X-rays every six weeks for years and years, all that led to a frustration show more with my sinuses, that meant that I would prefer to breathe through my mouth, which just perpetuated the likelihood of my breathing out of my mouth more—it made it a habit, one that reinforces itself. That tracks, I think. I know that I do feel better when I breath from my nose, when I exhale more in an intentional way, when I breathe slowly. All these things are ways I’ve found of calming myself, of soothing myself. So it makes sense that there’s folks out there who think that this is a part of some kind of way of transcending modernity through “the wisdom of the ancients” or some such alluring promise of deliverance by lost knowledge. That last step is where I grow uncomfortable, but the rest of it seems harmless enough, and offers just enough for me to make inferences about my own life and how little interventions could improve it.

It certainly can’t hurt to breathe more through my nose, and that’s the slack I give the book; it’s not hurting people with its material recommendations. Some of the other stuff, particularly the appeals to evolution, are shaky. The worst offense is how it castigates processed food and the rise of the industrial revolution with the changes, though I think it also wants to make some cases about agriculture? It doesn’t make many strong claims. But it does seem to be trying to say something like: "We don’t chew right or enough, so our skulls don’t develop right, which is wrong." Which is one step away from saying that the technological inventions that enable so many more people to live rather than die as children is somehow _bad_. And I have a problem with that kind of argument. It’s very close to evolutionary humanism, which is very close to eugenics. show less

I am tempted to give this five stars, but it had some slower parts, and I'm a little dubious of some of the data presented here, scientifically and statistically I think this is lacking.

Nestor looks at historical practices and some physiological and anthropological sources to come to some conclusions that may not be entirely related. He performs some tests on himself and a friend, they experiment, but he also interviews several people who regularly do breathwork--they have anecdotal evidence, and he speaks to a researcher who has findings related to anxiety.

I really enjoyed the journey, his research also looked at spiritual practitioners over a much longer period. I'm more inclined to believe breathwork results of thousands of years; show more overall I think there's some great stuff in this book, and it's intriguing enough to try. show less

Breath is a fascinating work of alternative medicine. Like a lot of people, Nestor was plagued by chronic respiratory problems, which were alleviated by a transformative experience at a breathwork class near his house in Haight-Ashbury. This lead Nestor down a decade-long journey into the world of what he calls pulmonauts; seekers, yogis, coaches, who have plumbed the mysteries of breath.

From a sense of raw physiology, modern breathing problems are just that, modern and artificial. Anthropological collections of pre-industrial skulls, as well as ethnological reports from around the world, show that people once had much better developed sinuses and jaws, and were in generally in better health. Nestor tracks this devolution to a diet of show more processed food, a change that occurred roughly 300 years ago. However, it can be reversed with jaw strengthening orthodontics (not tooth removal and braces), as well as a practice of nasal breathing.

There is a consensus that nasal breathing at around 5.5 complete continuous breaths per minute is important for health. This is the basic rhythm of yogi, qi gong, Christian prayers, and Plains Indians culture. "Mouth breather" is more than an insult. An experiment where Nestor and fellow pulmonaut Anders Olsson of the Conscious Breathing institute blocked their nostrils for 10 days basically wrecked his health. A following 10 day experiment on nasal breathing saw a more-than-complete recovery.

A host of Western scientific renegades have studied breath through the 20th century, prompting miraculous recoveries in sanitorium patients. Lung capacity is the best correlate of life expectance, though correlation doesn't imply causation. One interesting scientific thread follows the role of CO2 in healthy respiration. Anders Olsson is a strong proponent that most people breath too much, and that higher levels of blood CO2 confer health benefits. CO2 is linked to a very fundamental fear trigger divorced from other neural mechanisms, and CO2 therapy might have use in treating anxiety by resetting the breath.

After that is extreme breathing. Tumo is the Tibetan practice of using breath to increase the body's energy output, with monks literally melting circles in the snow around them. Wim Hof is a similar Western technique, and there are also athletic practices which have led to record setting outcomes. These extreme techniques basically involve small amounts of deliberate damage to build bodily strength, a reversal of the best practices of slow nasal breathing.

This book is inspiring, but has some oddities in its presentation. The conventional medical attitude towards breathwork comes off as conspiratorial. Nestor writes about miraculous changes, with a publisher's note that this is not medical advice and you should consult a doctor. The main causal mechanism around diseases of modernity, processed foods, has some causal problems as well. I'll buy that softer and more chewable food has lead to a host of problems, but I have some questions about the timing. Notably, 300 years ago doesn't seem to correspond to any shift. The modern grist mill was invented 200 years ago. Canning, refrigeration, and the TV dinner are more recent. Again, I'm not an expert on this, but 300 years ago most people were eating about the same stuff that they'd been eating since the dawn of agriculture, i.e. mostly gruel with a little bread and dairy.

I've become a lot more serious about making sure my breath is closed. And if you're interested, www.mrjamesnestor.com has a host of video tutorials as well as sources. show less