The 4 breathing secrets that will transform your health today | James Nestor

Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. The experiment was simple, but deeply uncomfortable. Two healthy men deliberately interfered with the body's most basic behavior, breathing. Their noses were sealed shut for ten days. They inhaled and exhaled only through their mouths while researchers tracked markers of health. The changes were dramatic. Blood pressure climbed. Sleep became fragmented. Cognitive function dropped, stress hormones surged. Within days, their physiology began to resemble that of people decades older. But this wasn't an extreme stress test. It closely mirrors how many people breathe every night, unaware of the strain that it places on their body. In this episode, we sit down with investigative journalist, James Nestor, author of the international bestseller, Breath, the new science of a lost art. He shares the science and history of breathing and how it can subtly impact your health. By the end, you'll see breathing not as something automatic, but as a powerful biological lever hiding in plain sight, And you'll know exactly what to do to get your breathing back on track using simple exercises. James, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. So we like to kick off our show here at Zoho with a rapid fire q and a with questions from our listeners. Are you willing to give it a go? I am. Good. And we have some very strict rules. You can say yes or no, or if you have to, a one sentence. Okay. Are most people breathing wrong? Yes. Did you once plug your nose with silicone for ten days in the name of science? Yes. Is breathing through your mouth healthy? No. Does mouth taping work? For some people. What's the biggest thing that people get wrong about breathing? They breathe too much. They breathe too much. Who knew that was a thing? Now if you're listening to this right now, obviously, you're breathing. I've been doing it all my life. And until about fifteen seconds ago, I never put any thought into it. But now I'm worrying that I'm doing it apparently too much, and our listeners, it sounds like, might be doing this as well. How did you first get interested in breathing? It wasn't something I set out to do journalistically. I was having a bunch of respiratory problems, and I wasn't finding any long term relief from them. I was getting bronchitis every year. I was getting mild pneumonia every year. And I noticed that my breathing was becoming more labored every year, even though I was eating the right food, sleeping eight hours a night, all that stuff. And finally, it got to the point where I was worried that I had a serious problem. Every time I went to the doctor, I was given antibiotics. This was before, of course, we knew what antibiotics do to your gut microbiome. And it wasn't until a doctor friend of …