Laura: Alright, Sophia, here's a wild statistic for you. Researchers estimate that up to 90% of us are breathing incorrectly. And this isn't just a minor flaw—it's linked to everything from anxiety and ADHD to crooked teeth and autoimmune diseases. We've literally forgotten how to breathe. Sophia: Ninety percent? That can't be right. Breathing is automatic! It’s the one thing we don't have to think about. How can we all be failing at it? Laura: That's exactly the question that sent journalist James Nestor on a decade-long journey, culminating in his book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. What's fascinating is that his own struggles with recurring pneumonia, something doctors couldn't fix, pushed him to investigate this. He became a human guinea pig to figure it out. Sophia: A guinea pig? I'm intrigued and a little scared. That sounds like a recipe for a very strange and uncomfortable book. Laura: Oh, it gets uncomfortable. And that’s where the story truly begins.

Laura: Speaking of being a guinea pig, Nestor's most shocking experiment is where this all starts. He and a breathing therapist from Sweden, Anders Olsson, volunteered for a study at Stanford University. The goal? To scientifically document the effects of mouthbreathing. For ten days, they had their nostrils completely plugged with silicone and surgical tape. Sophia: Hold on. He paid to have his nose plugged for ten days? This sounds like the worst wellness retreat ever. What on earth happened? Laura: Absolute chaos, biologically speaking. Within the first 24 hours, Nestor’s snoring, which was minimal before, increased by 1,300 percent. By the end, it was over 4,000 percent. He developed sleep apnea, waking up dozens of time an hour gasping for air. His blood pressure shot up into stage 2 hypertension. His heart rate variability plummeted, a sign of constant stress. And to top it all off, his body was so out of whack that his sinuses became a breeding ground for a nasty bacterial infection. Sophia: That is horrifying. And all from just… breathing through his mouth? It sounds like his body was staging a full-scale rebellion. Laura: It was! And Olsson, his partner in this misery, experienced the same. They felt foggy, irritable, and physically exhausted. The moment they took the plugs out and breathed through their noses again, everything started to reverse. The snoring vanished, blood pressure normalized, and they felt clear-headed and energetic. It was a dramatic, firsthand demonstration of a central, terrifying idea in the book: modern humans have become the worst breathers in the animal kingdom. Sophia: The worst? Worse than a pug? That’s a bold claim. How did we get so bad at something so fundamental? Laura: Nestor calls it "dysevolution." It’s the idea that some of our evolutionary changes have actually been for the worse. He traces it back a few hundred years to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of processed foods. Our ancestors chewed for hours a day on tough, fibrous foods. This constant work stimulated the bones in their faces to grow forward and wide, creating huge sinus cavities and broad dental arches. Sophia: Okay, I can see that. More chewing, stronger jaws. Makes sense. Laura: Exactly. Nestor describes the work of orthodontist Marianna Evans, who studied thousands of ancient skulls in collections like the Morton Collection in Philadelphia. Without exception, these pre-industrial skulls had forward-growing faces, wide airways, and perfectly straight teeth. No orthodontics needed. Then, you look at skulls from the last 200 years, and it's a disaster zone: recessed chins, shrunken sinuses, and crooked, crowded teeth. Sophia: So our obsession with soft, mushy, easy-to-eat food has literally shrunk our faces and blocked our airways. We traded strong jaws for crooked teeth and a lifetime of snoring. Laura: Precisely. The real estate in the front of our skulls has shrunk, and our tongues and soft tissues have nowhere to go but back into our airways, obstructing them. We became chronic mouthbreathers not out of laziness, but out of necessity. Our noses got clogged, and our mouths became our only option. We are, as Nestor puts it, the most plugged-up species on Earth. Sophia: Wow. So it’s not just a bad habit, it’s an architectural problem we created for ourselves. That’s… deeply unsettling. So we're all a mess. Fantastic. Is there any good news? Can we fix our 'dysevolved' faces?

Laura: There is good news! And it’s surprisingly simple. The book is really a journey of rediscovering this lost art, and the first step is just to appreciate the technology we were all born with: the nose. Sophia: You mean this thing on my face I mostly use for smelling coffee and complaining about allergies? Laura: The very same. But it’s so much more than that. The nose is an incredible piece of biological engineering. It doesn't just let air in; it heats, moistens, pressurizes, and filters it. The turbinates—those bony structures inside—create a vortex that swirls the air, giving it more time to be cleaned and humidified before it hits our delicate lungs. Mouthbreathing is like drinking unfiltered pond water; nasal breathing is like having a state-of-the-art purification system. Sophia: So the nose is like a high-tech air purifier we all got for free and never use? Laura: A perfect analogy. And it gets better. Nasal breathing boosts the body's production of nitric oxide, a miracle molecule that plays a huge role in vasodilation—widening our blood vessels. This lowers blood pressure and dramatically increases oxygen absorption in the blood. You get about 20% more oxygen from a nasal breath than an identical-sized mouth breath. Sophia: Twenty percent! That’s a huge difference. So all those yoga teachers telling us to breathe through our nose were right all along? It's not just some spiritual thing? Laura: They were absolutely right, and it’s deeply scientific. Nestor tells this amazing story about a 19th-century artist named George Catlin. Catlin spent years traveling and living among fifty different Native American tribes, and he was astounded by their physical vitality, their strength, and their perfect teeth. He became obsessed with figuring out their secret. Sophia: And what was it? A special diet? A magic herb? Laura: It was simpler. He concluded it was their unwavering commitment to one rule, taught from infancy: shut your mouth. They saw mouthbreathing as a path to weakness and disease. Mothers would gently press their babies' lips closed as they slept. Catlin was so convinced that he wrote a whole book about it, ending with the advice: "If I were to endeavor to bequeath to posterity the most important Motto which human language can convey, it should be in three words—SHUT-YOUR-MOUTH." Sophia: I love that. So direct. So what’s the modern equivalent of that? Do we all just need to be more mindful? Laura: Mindfulness is part of it, but the book also gets very practical. The second piece of ancient wisdom is about slowing down. Researchers found that across cultures and spiritual traditions—from Catholic rosary prayers to Buddhist chants to Hindu mantras—the most calming and centering practices all converge on a specific breathing rate. Sophia: Let me guess, it’s not the frantic, shallow breathing I do when I’m staring at my inbox. Laura: Not quite. It’s about 5.5 breaths per minute. That translates to a 5.5-second inhale and a 5.5-second exhale. They call this "resonant" or "coherent" breathing. When you breathe at this rate, your heart, circulation, and nervous system all sync up. It’s the state of maximum efficiency. Blood pressure drops, heart rate variability increases, and oxygen delivery to the brain is optimized. Sophia: 5.5 seconds in, 5.5 seconds out. That actually sounds doable. But what about at night? That's when my mouthbreathing alter ego takes over. Laura: And that’s where Nestor introduces a solution that is both incredibly effective and slightly ridiculous: mouth taping. Just a small piece of gentle, porous tape over the lips before bed. It’s not about forcing your mouth shut, but providing a gentle reminder to your subconscious to keep it closed and use the nose. The book is filled with stories of people, including Nestor himself, who eliminated snoring and dramatically improved their sleep quality with this one simple, cheap trick. Sophia: Mouth taping. Okay, my partner might think I've finally lost it, but for a 20% oxygen boost, I might just try it. Mouth taping I can handle. But the book goes into some pretty extreme stuff too, right? Like, intentionally hyperventilating?

Laura: It does. And this is where we get into what Nestor calls "Breathing+." These are techniques that go beyond gentle, restorative breathing and push the body into extreme states for therapeutic reasons. It’s about using breath as a form of intermittent stress to jolt the system back into balance. Sophia: Intermittent stress… like a cold plunge for your lungs? Laura: Exactly like that. And the most famous example of this is the story of Wim Hof, the "Iceman." He’s a Dutch guy who became famous for his seemingly superhuman feats, like running a half-marathon in the Arctic Circle in just his shorts, or sitting in a tub of ice for nearly two hours. Sophia: Right, I’ve seen videos of him. He seems like a madman, but a very happy madman. How does he do it? Laura: He credits a breathing technique he adapted from an ancient Tibetan practice called Tummo, or "Inner Fire" meditation. It involves rounds of powerful, rapid breathing—essentially controlled hyperventilation—followed by a long breath-hold. This process floods the body with adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol. It's a massive, self-induced stress response. Sophia: So he's intentionally putting his body into fight-or-flight mode? Why would anyone want to do that? Laura: Because what he demonstrated is that by consciously turning on the sympathetic nervous system—the "fight-or-flight" side—he could then gain conscious control over systems that science long believed were purely autonomic, or automatic. In a landmark study at Radboud University, scientists injected him with an endotoxin that should have made him violently ill with fever and nausea. Sophia: And? Laura: Nothing. He just sat there, did his breathing, and his immune system fought it off with almost no symptoms. He consciously willed his body to produce anti-inflammatory proteins. Then, to prove it wasn't just a fluke, they trained a group of regular volunteers in his method for a few days. They, too, were able to control their immune response. It was a groundbreaking discovery. Sophia: Wow. That’s incredible. But this is where the book gets polarizing for some readers, isn't it? It sounds amazing, but how much is proven science versus a one-off phenomenon like Wim Hof? Laura: That's a fair question, and Nestor addresses it. The book is careful to frame these as powerful but advanced techniques. It's not a cure-all. The science behind how it works is still emerging, but the core principle of using breath to influence the autonomic nervous system is becoming more accepted. It’s about building resilience. By putting your body through these intense, voluntary stressors in a controlled way, you become better at handling the involuntary stressors of daily life. Sophia: So, after all this—the plugged noses, the ancient skulls, the Iceman—what's the one big idea we should walk away with?

Laura: I think it's that breathing isn't just a background function; it's a pillar of health as fundamental as diet or exercise. For centuries, we've outsourced our health to pills and procedures, but we've neglected this free, powerful tool we carry with us every moment. The book's ultimate message is that by simply paying attention to our breath, we can reclaim a degree of control over our own biology that we never thought possible. Sophia: It’s empowering, really. It suggests that we're not just passive victims of our genetics or our environment. We have agency. Laura: We have so much agency. And it doesn't have to be extreme. You don't have to sit in an ice bath. It can start with just closing your mouth. Or trying that 5.5-second breath for a few minutes. These small changes, practiced consistently, can have profound effects. The book is a powerful reminder that sometimes the most transformative changes come from mastering the simplest things. Sophia: So the challenge for everyone listening is simple. For the next hour, just notice your breath. Are you breathing through your nose or your mouth? No judgment, just awareness. That's the first step. Laura: Exactly. And we'd love to hear what you discover. Share your experience with the Aibrary community on our social channels. It's a fascinating personal experiment. Sophia: Absolutely. This has been eye-opening. Or, I guess, nose-opening. Laura: This is Aibrary, signing off.