Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how resilient our genes are, how skinny or young or wise we are—none of it will matter unless we’re breathing correctly. That’s what these researchers discovered. The missing pillar in health is breath. It all starts there.”

Nestor notes that breathing is the basic building block to all health, yet most people do not think about it when considering their overall wellbeing. Nestor’s book, which draws on current scientific research as well as ancient texts and practices, aims to rectify this oversight by explaining the centrality of breathing to human health.

“I call this a ‘lost art’ because so many of these new discoveries aren’t new at all. Most of the techniques I’ll be exploring have been around for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. They were created, documented, forgotten, and discovered in another culture at another time, then forgotten again. This went on for centuries.” 

While the study of breathing may seem like a new field of research, Nestor argues this is not the case. He cites the work of ancient scholars and pulmonauts—respiratory tinkerers and inventors—who have studied, practiced, and taught breathing techniques for generations, centuries, and even millennia. Nestor’s description of breathing as an “art” also highlights that it is just as much a creative and cultural act as it is a biological function for survival.

“The patient arrived, pale and torpid, at 9:32 a.m. Male, middle-aged, 175 pounds. Talkative and friendly but visibly anxious. Pain: none. Fatigue: a little. Level of anxiety: moderate. Fears about progression and future symptoms: high.” 

Nestor’s description of his own state of health showcases his humorous writing style, for it is not apparent until a few paragraphs later that Nestor is writing about himself. The passage also sets up a recurring pattern in the book, in which Nestor describes individual cases where chronic maladies were resolved with novel breathing therapies.

“Evolution doesn’t always mean progress, Evans told me. It means change. And life can change for better or worse. Today, the human body is changing in ways that have nothing to do with the ‘survival of the fittest.’ Instead, we’re adopting and passing down traits that are detrimental to our health. This concept, called dysevolution, was made popular by Harvard biologist Daniel Liberman, and it explains why our backs ache, feet hurt, and bones are growing more brittle. Dysevolution also helps explain why we’re breathing so poorly.” 

Dr. Mariana Evans is a dentist and orthodontist who has spent several years studying ancient and modern human skulls. Her research shows that humans have passed down physical traits that have made it difficult to breathe easily. Discussing human physiological adaptations that have occurred over the course of evolutionary history, Nestor attributes human dysevolution primarily to industrialization, which led to a number of modifications to breathing that have negatively impacted human health.

“Mouthbreathing, it turns out, changes the physical body and transforms airways, all for the worse. Inhaling air through the mouth decreases pressure, which causes the soft tissues in the back of the mouth to become loose and flex inward, creating less overall space and making breathing more difficult. Mouthbreathing begets more mouthbreathing.”

Mouth breathing is detrimental to human health, as seen in the rapid deterioration in Nestor and Olsson’s health when they embark on a ten-day experiment to breathe only through their mouths. At the end of the experiment, Nestor and Olsson feel miserable, providing anecdotal evidence to scientific data that confirms mouth breathing is not best practice.

“Inhaling from the nose has the opposite effect. It forces air against all those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and breathing easier. After a while, these tissues and muscles get ‘toned’ to stay in this opened and wide position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal breathing.” 

Nasal breathing is beneficial to human health because, unlike mouth breathing, it “tones” tissues and muscles, making it easier to breathe. Eventually nasal breathing becomes an unconscious habit. 

“Working together, the different areas of the turbinates will heat, clean, slow, and pressurize air so that the lungs can extract more oxygen with each breath. This is why nasal breathing is far more healthy and efficient than breathing through the mouth. As Nayak explained when I first met him, the nose is the silent warrior: the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our minds, and weather vane to our emotions.”

Several aspects of nasal breathing make it effective. Nestor describes turbinates in detail and returns to their importance in later chapters when he describes “empty nose syndrome,” a painful condition that occurs if too much tissue and turbinates are removed during nasal surgery. Here, as elsewhere, Nestor’s writing style combines scientific terms with more literary prose and explanations.

“The Native Americans explained to Caitlin that breath inhaled through the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress and disease. On the other hand, breath inhaled through the nose kept the body strong, made the face beautiful, and prevented disease. ‘The air which enters the lungs is as different from that which enters the nostrils as distilled water is different from the water in an ordinary cistern or a frog-pond,’ he wrote.”

Nestor frequently includes historical and cross-cultural examples in his discussions of breathing practices. Here, he describes the findings of George Caitlin who traveled extensively throughout the American West documenting the lifestyles of different Native American societies during the mid-19th century. Nestor uses Caitlin’s research to support his argument that nasal breathing is superior to mouth breathing.

“But what the Tibetans have long known and what Western science is now discovering is that aging doesn’t have to be a one-way path of decline. The internal organs are malleable, and we can change them at nearly any time.” 

One of Nestor’s main points in the book is that the body is malleable and human physiology is not predetermined at birth. It is possible, even at an advanced age, to dramatically alter the body, including its internal organs, and to improve one’s health, fitness, and overall wellbeing. Nestor attributes these changes to the transformative power of breathing.

“After my own experience in Martin’s studio for an hour, babbling numbers and having my chest poked and ribs squeezes, it became more clear to me why Stough’s work never caught on. It didn’t matter that saxophonist David Sanborn and asthmatic opera singers, Olympic runners, and hundreds of emphysema survivors praised his treatments as a lifesaver, Stough wasn’t a doctor; he was a self-made pulmonaut, a choir conductor. He was just too far out there. His therapy was just too weird.” 

Nestor cites at length the innovative and important contributions that Carl Stough—a pulmonaut—made to the field of respiratory health. However, Stough’s therapies are not widely practiced after his death, due to his unorthodox methods. Pulmonology is not accepting of novel approaches and theories, especially if they do originate from medical practitioners.

“What many of these doctors found, and what Olsson would discover much later, was that the best way to prevent many chronic health problems, improve athletic performance, and extend longevity was to focus on how we breathed, specifically to balance oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the body. To do this, we’d need to learn how to inhale and exhale slowly.” 

One of Nestor’s main points is that breathing slowly, as a habit, is better than breathing quickly. His focus on exhaling also highlights the importance of carbon dioxide levels in the bloodstream. People typically assume that an increase in oxygen in the body produces optimal health benefits, but Nestor argues the opposite. He explains that most people need more carbon dioxide to function better, which can be achieved through slower breathing and full exhales.

“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 as the rosary.” 

In describing the perfect breath, Nestor highlights the connections between breathing and meditative practices. Different religious and cultural groups from all over the world recognize the power of breathing—and specifically the 5.5-second rhythm—as having a calming and transformative effect on the human body and mind.

“What if overbreathing wasn’t the result of hypertension and headaches but the cause? Buteyko wondered. Heart disease, ulcers, and chronic inflammation were all linked to disturbances in circulation, blood, pH, and metabolism. How we breathe affects all of those functions. Breathing just 20 percent, or even 10 percent more than the body’s needs could overwork our systems. Eventually, they’d weaken and falter. Was breathing too much making people sick, and keeping them that way?” 

Nestor draws extensively on the research of Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko, a medical doctor and pulmonaut who made significant contributions to the field of respiratory health. Buteyko suffered from high blood pressure and learned to improve his symptoms by breathing less. Buteyko used his insights about taking in less oxygen to help thousands of patients with chronic diseases, including asthma. Many of his breathing insights also helped athletes reach optimal fitness and performance.

“That’s when it starts to hit me: an intense heat at the back of my neck and pixelated vision. I’m still jogging, exhaling long breaths, but it feels as though I’m simultaneously jumping headfirst into warm, thick liquid. I run a little harder, breathe a little less, and feel heat, heavy like hot syrup, seeping down into my fingertips, toes, arms, and legs. It feels great. The warmth moves higher through my face and wraps around the crown of my head.” 

Olsson convinces Nestor to experiment with inhaling less and exhaling more while jogging. The goal is to build up carbon dioxide levels to improve aerobic endurance, which will improve Nestor’s fitness and health overall. Nestor feels euphoria while breathing less during exercise. The passage is a good example of his rhetorical technique, which frequently draws on subjective, personal accounts to convey the benefits of novel breathing techniques.

“As random as it might seem, this mundane act—that few seconds of soft chewing—was the catalyst for writing this book. It’s what inspired me to turn the casual hobby of investigating what happened to me in that Victorian room a decade ago into a full-time quest to discover the lost art and science of breathing.”

At the end of Olsson and Nestor’s twenty-day nasal breathing experiment, Nestor eats his last diet-regulated dinner, a meal that consists entirely of soft foods. The moment is a revelatory one—Nestor realizes that hard chewing is integral to good breathing. This soft meal prompts him to write an entire book about breathing.

“Yes, vitamin deficiencies might explain why so many people eating industrialized foods were sick; they might explain why so many were getting cavities and why their bones were growing weak. But they couldn’t fully explain the sudden and extreme shrinking of the mouth and blocking of airways that swept through modern societies. Even if our ancestors consumed a full spectrum of vitamins and minerals every day, their mouths would still grow too small, teeth would come in crooked, and airways would become obstructed. What was true for our ancestors was also true for us. The problem had less to do with what we were eating than how we ate it.” 

Highlighting the importance of hard chewing for human facial physiology, Nestor links industrialization, with its highly processed and refined foods, to a decline in human health. Soft foods that do not require hard chewing lead to smaller mouths. This in turn reduces air passages, inhibiting easy breathing, and causes crooked teeth.

“This is what I learned at the end of this long and very strange trip through the causes and cures of airway obstruction. That our noses and mouths are not predetermined at birth, childhood, or even in adulthood. We can reverse the clock on much of the damage that’s been done in the past few hundred years by force of will, with nothing more than proper posture, hard chewing, and perhaps some mewing.” 

While Nestor addresses many illnesses associated with poor breathing practices, he recognizes that it is entirely possible to fix these problems with low-tech solutions, like good oral posture, hard chewing, and mewing—a type of mouth exercise named after John Mew, a dentist, facial surgeon, and pulmonaut. A key insight in the book is that the human body, including our noses and mouths, is highly malleable.

“Collectively, I’m calling these potent techniques Breathing+, because they build on the foundation of practices I described earlier in the book, and because many require extra focus and offer extra rewards. Some involve breathing really fast for a very long time; others require breathing very slowly for even longer. A few entail not breathing at all for a few minutes. These methods, too, date back thousands of years, vanished, then were rediscovered again at a different time in a different culture, renamed and redeployed.” 

Part 3 of the book focuses on advanced breathing techniques that Nestor refers to as Breathing+. These techniques are not accessible to everyone, for they require a lot of training and willingness to endure discomfort. Nestor thinks they are worth it, so he tries many of them himself to demonstrate their effectiveness. 

“This flip-flopping—breathing all-out, then not at all, getting really cold and then hot again—is the key to Tummo’s magic. It forces the body into high stress one minute, a state of extreme relaxation the next. Carbon dioxide levels in the blood crash, then they build back up. Tissues become oxygen deficient and then flooded again. The body becomes more adaptable and flexible and learns that all these physiological responses can come under our control. Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken.” 

Tummo, also known as “Inner Fire Mediation,” is one of the Breathing+ techniques that Nestor practices. Personal trainer Chuck McGee describes why Tummo is such an effective healing practice—McGee uses it to manage his Type 1 diabetes and associated symptoms.

“Beyond a few scars on their heads, the monkeys looked normal, but something was wrong inside their brains. They had trouble navigating the world. Some starved to death. Others drowned. A few were quickly devoured by animals. Within two weeks, all of Kling’s monkeys were dead.” 

Nestor frequently explains scientific advancements in human physiology, biochemistry, and neuropsychology through comparative animal research. While ambivalent about the methods used in early scientific studies, Nestor recognizes the importance of these findings. In this case, a scientist lobotomized monkeys to understand the function of the amygdala, a part of the brain that helps animals regulate emotions and make decisions. This research leads Nestor to examine the importance of chemoreceptor flexibility and its implications for individuals suffering from anxiety disorders. 

“I sit there for a few minutes sweating, kind of laughing, kind of crying. I’m trying to prepare myself for two more inhales of this ghastly mixture of gas over the next 15 minutes. Any self-talk I can muster—This choking is just an illusion; relax, it will only last a few minutes—does nothing.” 

Nestor’s participates in an experiment that forces him to inhale elevated levels of carbon dioxide. The experiment is part of an exposure therapy treatment meant to help patients with anxiety disorders. The experience illustrates Nestor’s commitment to learning everything he can about novel breathing therapies, including trying them out himself.

“There is no mention in the Yogi Sutras of moving between or even repeating poses. The Sanskrit word asana originally meant ‘seat’ and ‘posture.’ It referred both to the act of sitting and the material you sit on. What it specifically did not mean was to stand up and move about. The earliest yoga was a science of holding still and building prana through breathing.” 

Nestor often describes ancient breathing practices through historical texts. Here, he explains the difference between Yôga and modern yoga practices. Yôga emphasizes sitting still and using breathing to accumulate prana—“life force” or “vital energy” (187). Modern yoga is aerobic exercise that focuses more on movement.

“The key to Sudarshan Kriya, or any other breathing practice rooted in ancient yoga is to learn to be patient, maintain flexibility, and slowly absorb what breathing has to offer. My initial experience with Sudarshan Kriya may have been a bit jarring, DeRose says, but it also convinced me of the sheer power of breathing.” 

Sudarshan Kriya is a breathing exercise that Nestor tries at the beginning of the book and is returns to in its concluding chapters. Yoga expert Luíz Sérgio Álvares DeRose explains that Nestor that had a strong reaction to Sudarshan Kriya when he first tried it because he had not yet built up enough exposure to prana and it overwhelmed him.