Your world speaks. We listen. back. And I just want to note that a lot of people are talking about breath, right? It's kind of trendy, especially in the world of bro podcasts. I

don't think that most people realize just how important how we breathe is. Just

the land of cold plunges.

Tell me if you were ever in a bad mood getting out of cold plunges.

Intermittent fasting. Just eat all the food

you want to eat, but just eat it in that window.

And other wellness trends taken to the extreme.

How would you guys like to learn a 60 second breathwork technique? I just finished up like a seven minute guided breathing session. Oh my God,

bro. Why am I shaking? Who's idea was this? Yeah, writer James Nester has no time for this. Most

of those bros who claim to be at absolute peak health the worst breathers you can find out there. Really? I'm being serious because a lot of them are completely vain and they do not allow their stomachs to relax. If you are constantly inhaling and sucking up your gut, you're inhibiting the extension of the diaphragm. You're inhibiting blood flow. You're inhibiting ability of the body to pump lymph fluid, you are causing stress because you are clenching your stomach and sending signals up to your brain that you are in a state of stress. So don't look to those bros for healthy breathing. James

is a science journalist, but he embarked on trying to better understand what happens when we breathe properly because of personal problems.

I was suffering from chronic bronchitis. I was getting mild bouts of pneumonia every year. I was starting to wheeze when I was working out and I thought I was doing everything right, you know, eating the right foods, exercising, sleeping eight hours a night, all of that. But I just kept getting sick with breathing problems. So it wasn't until a doctor friend suggested I look into my breathing habits, which is something I had never thought about before. And once I adjusted those habits and started understanding that it's not just that we're breathing, but how we're breathing, it had a huge transformational effect, not only on my respiration, but on other aspects of my health.

Yeah. Can you explain like what is poor breathing, and what is good breathing?

Poor breathing is what you see when you look at around 90% of the population. It includes breathing through the mouth, it includes breathing up into the chest, it includes unconsciously holding your breath, breathing too much, snoring, sleep apnea, asthma, on and on and on. And

what are the consequences of that? How does that impact a person's health? Because I think people think, well, if as long as I'm like breathing, I'm alive, right? Well,

on the milder spectrum, the consequences are more asthma, more panic, more anxiety, more stress on the more severe spectrum. If you continue having very dysfunctional breathing habits throughout your life, especially at night, that can lead to increased risk of stroke, heart disease, periodontal disease, diabetes. So all of these major chronic diseases that we're contending with have some sort of connection to how we're breathing.

You call breathing like this a lost art. When did we lose it?

It's hard to trace the exact moment, but you can trace a lot of this to the age of industrialization. We lost so much 400 years ago, 300 years ago. So we lost our food supply that used to be whole foods and natural and require a bunch of chewing, which allowed us to expand our mouths and tone our airways and breathe better. our ability to have proper posture. And without having proper posture, it is very difficult to take a proper breath. If you are hunched over, you can't extend your belly. You can't take that soft, slow, deep breath. All your breath gets caught up in your chest, and that is extremely inefficient. You're

right. There's no I just caught myself. Like, I'm leaned over my laptop, and there's nowhere for it to go. The air just has to go up, because, because I, whatever happened to stomachs, and shoulders back, that's what I used to be told.

The old days, yeah. So, if you are ever apprehensive about how you're breathing, look at how a healthy dog breathes, healthy infant breathes, a cheetah, a horse, a cow. They breathe very deep. Their stomachs expand very gently when they breathe. They breathe very slowly and they breathe in and out of their noses.