#641 - Breathing Expert James Nestor

**Theo Von** (0:00)
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James Nestor, good to see you today, brother.

**James Nestor** (1:55)
Thanks for having me.

**Theo Von** (1:56)
You bet. You have a new, a revised edition of your New York Times bestseller, Breath, the New Science of a Lost Art.

**James Nestor** (2:04)
That's it.

**Theo Von** (2:05)
And you believe that how we breathe can change every aspect of our lives.

**James Nestor** (2:09)
I don't believe this, I know this. And not every aspect, but many aspects, many aspects that people would not suspect. So it can change our athletic performance, vastly improve it, it can allow us to sleep better, allow us to think better, have better sex, if you're into that kind of thing. A whole bunch of other measurable improvements to our lives and nobody's really thinking about it.

**Theo Von** (2:36)
Yeah, I guess it's something that we just don't think about very often. You know, it's just, it's odd because it's happening all the time, but it's not on the front of our brains.

**James Nestor** (2:45)
We don't think about it because we've evolved not to think about it, which is great. I mean, if we had to think about every single breath, we're taking all the time, how awful that would be. But it works in the background, and the problem is we develop really bad habits, and those habits start working on the background, and we don't notice that those negative breathing habits are affecting how often we get headaches, how tired we are, the amount of cavities that we're getting, on and on and on. And so people just don't think about it because they don't need to, but if they would start to and start taking conscious control of this, we know it has vast improvements.

**Theo Von** (3:20)
Is that why you call it a lost art?

**James Nestor** (3:22)
It's a lost art, yeah, because ancient cultures, you look back in ancient Hindu cultures, ancient Chinese cultures, even ancient Native American cultures, they all celebrated breathing as a medicine. This was something they really focused on. It was as essential as the food you were eating or the amount of exercise you were getting.

**Theo Von** (3:41)
Yeah, because it really is a diet for your lungs.

**James Nestor** (3:43)
It's a diet. We get most of our energy from air, not from food and not from drink, from air. I can prove this. If you hold your breath for six minutes, you're going to go unconscious, right? Your body is going to start to shut down, but you can go without food for how long? 40 days, something? You can go without water for maybe a week and a half or so. But if you go without breathing for a few minutes, you're gone.

**Theo Von** (4:08)
Yeah. Well, yeah, you don't even think about that, how crucial it is, how crucial of a supplement it is to every moment of our lives. I know you have so many amazing practices that you've taught people and I want to learn some of those. Take me a little bit through the history of breathing. Like what were some of the first cultures that really focused on breath work?