Do you suffer from, or know someone who suffers from:
->Scoliosis ->Chronic insomnia ->High blood pressure ->Sleep apnea ->Snoring ->Elevated heart rate ->ADHD ->Bed-wetting ->Cancer ->Low mental clarity ->Depression ->Dehydration ->Getting up to pee in the night ->Tight shoulders ->Poor core muscles
Or poor athletic performance….Just to name a few things.
What a big list! What could possibly impact all of these maladies?
What if I could give you a simple tool that should impact any or all of those diseases?
Would you be willing to try it?
By the way….Here’s another great attribute to this ‘magic pill’…
It’s free and you can start immediately.
Immediately.
What, oh what, is this magic pill?
Believe it or not, this magic pill isn’t a pill at all. (You know I’m not crazy about pills!)
It’s actually …drumroll… how you breathe.
Have you ever paid attention to exactly how you breathe?
What I’d like to know is HOW. How do you breathe?
Are you a mouth breather, or are you a nose breather?
I’ve just finished James Nestor’s book Breath. He spends the entirety of the book making the case for nose breathing, summarizing a decade of his personal research into the centuries of fellow ‘pulmonauts’ who have conducted experiments on themselves and others in an effort to impact all of the diseases listed above.
In 2013, for instance, a research group in Japan compared oxygenation to the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain associated with ADHD) in mouth breathers vs. nose breathers. The mouth breathers “delivered a disturbance of the oxygen getting to the prefrontal cortex. Nasal breathers had no such effects.” (P. 31)
A friend of mine named Kristin noticed the difference in her ability to focus right away. She posted to Facebook that “her monkey mind was quieted”. Here is what she said:
When the author subjected himself to a ten day mouth breathing experiment run by the Stanford Chief of Rhinology Dr. Jayakar Nayak he found that in the very first 24 hours he had 4 fourfold increase in sleep apnea events. Additionally, his snoring increased by 1300% to 75 minutes/night.
In 10 days his snoring increased by 4,820%.
How about that. I’m no statistician, but that’s pretty impressive.
That wasn’t all… after 10 days of mouth breathing he had 25 sleep apnea ‘events’ where blood oxygen dropped below 90%. Why is this significant? Because “blood can’t carry enough oxygen to support body tissues. If this goes on too long, it can lead to heart failure, depression, memory problems, and early death.” (P. 20)
He wrote about his fear in recognizing that his own body was caving in on itself, and severely impacting his health, vitality, and longevity in a very short period of time…10 days to be exact!
Caving in?
Turns out that “Mouthbreathing changes the physical body and transforms airways, all for the worse. Inhaling through the mouth decreases pressure, which causes the soft tissues in the back of the mouth to become loose and flex inward, creating less space and making breathing more difficult. Mouthbreathing begets mouthbreathing.”
In contrast, nasal breathing “forces air against those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making airways wider and breathing easier. After awhile, these tissues and muscles get “toned” to stay in this wide and open position. Nasal breathing begets nasal breathing. “ (P. 27)
How might this impact your exercise?
Well, in the 90’s Dr. John Douillard trained elite athletes like the New Jersey Nets, Billie Jean King, and triathletes. He decided to put pro cyclists on stationary bikes with heart rate and breathing rate sensors and slowly increased the resistance while exclusively mouth breathing. “As intensity increased, so did the rate of breathing, which was expected. By the time athletes reached the hardest stage of the test, pedaling out 200 watts of power, they were panting and struggling to catch a breath.” (P. 23)
Now they switched to nose breathing. “As the intensity of exercise increased during this phase, the rate of breathing decreased. At the final 200-watt stage one subject who was mouth breathing at a rate of 47 breaths per minute was nasal breathing at a rate of 14 breaths a minute. He maintained the same heart rate at which he’d started the test, even though the intensity of the exercise has increased tenfold.”
WOW!
How would you like to maintain the same heart rate, regardless of the intensity?
This was Dr. Douillard’s fantastic conclusion:
“Simply training yourself to breathe through your nose, Douillard reported, could cut total exertion in half and offer huge gains in endurance. The athletes felt invigorated while nasal breathing rather than exhausted. They all swore off breathing through their mouths ever again.” (P. 24)
Swore off.
Ever again.
That’s pretty powerful.
Doesn’t matter that they were pro athletes.
Just matters that they were deeply impressed.
Here’s my question: Knowing what you do now about the benefits of nose breathing, why would you ever do anything else?
“But Laura, I have allergies.”
“But Laura, I have a deviated septum.”
“But Laura, I have asthma.”
All the more reason to get started right away! There’s no time to lose!
Don’t let evolutionary biologists take a look at your skull 100 years from now and shake their heads. 🙂
Let me know in the comments below how quickly you are going to get started on this!
P.S. Note that the page numbers I took direct quotes from only go up to page 31.
Can you imagine all the fun that awaits you from pages 32- 230??? I will write more on this coming up!
