Change Your Breath, Change Your Life - James Nestor - #350

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's happening, people, welcome back to the show. My guest today is James Nestor. He's a journalist and an author. We get more energy from our breath than we do from our food, hydration, or sleep. And yet, most people have never considered assessing how properly they breathe. Thankfully, James has spent years speaking to the world's leading researchers, breathwork teachers, monks, and freedivers to find out exactly what we need to know. Today, expect to learn why computer use is affecting your breath, how poor breathing can cause diabetes, why snoring is a dangerous habit, James' tips for optimizing your daily breathing, the best strategies to use for athletic performance, how to improve your breathing while you sleep, and much more. This is just one of those game-changing, fundamental insights that everybody needs to know about the way that they live their daily lives. The same as Matthew Walker's, why we sleep and understanding that you need to get sufficient sleep. The insights and the principles that James gives you today are so crucial to ensuring that your health is looked after in the short term and in the long term. Plus, it'll mean that you maximize your performance as well day to day. This is like an absolute must-listen. You should be hysterically, fanatically, intensely focused throughout this entire episode because James gives some absolute bombs of advice. In other news, before I get to other news, Modern Wisdom reading list nearly finished, I promise. Just a couple, a few more final amends and it will be released 100 books to read before you die. Everything that has had the biggest impact on me over the last few years, that will be available for free very soon. Keep your ears and eyes peeled and I will tell you once you can get your copy. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful James Nestor.
Three, two, one. All right, we're rolling. James, welcome to the show. How crazy has the last year been for you after your book came out? Because it feels like breathwork is everywhere at the moment.

**James Nestor** (2:14)
Well, I think it was a crazy year for everybody for so many different reasons. I mean, you put a pandemic on to a virtual book tour, on to me finally coming out of my closets after so many years of research and writing to be on the other side of the mic. And it's been complete and utter chaos, to put it mildly, but in almost all good ways. I'm very grateful for the attention and I'm very grateful that people have discovered breathing as a way to help improve their health.

**Chris Williamson** (2:46)
Yeah. And you talk about how these insights of breathing have been around for a very, very long time, you know, thousands and thousands of years, but aren't still now super widely known. Isn't it crazy in the 21st century that we can still have gated information, that there's stuff that monks and monasteries somewhere know, but that the internet doesn't?

**James Nestor** (3:06)
Well, I think that if you look at medicine and if you look at so much of science, this is exactly the pattern it takes, is in one culture, a group will discover something to be true. And in another culture where that group had no association with the previous group, they discovered the same exact thing. This is true with nutrition, it's true with exercise and it's certainly true with breathing. So it wasn't that surprising to see that we've had this huge blind spot because we've had huge blind spots in regards to so many other things, so many other very basic things that have to do with human health.

**Chris Williamson** (3:42)
Yeah, we saw that with Matthew Walker's book, right? That Why We Sleep. Why should a book about something that everybody does for a third of their life be so revolutionary?

**James Nestor** (3:51)
I was just talking with Matthew Walker a couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to interview him at a conference, our first conference since the pandemic is somewhat lightened up here in the US. And I was cracking up because when I first heard of that book, I said, you have to be kidding me. Now some guy wants to teach me how to sleep. I sleep just fine. And then we realized that breathing and sleeping, both people expect them to be at default reaction, something that we don't need to think about. But then you look at populations across populations of people who are sleeping, people who are breathing dysfunctionally, and there is an epidemic going on on both of those fronts. And there's a lot of crossover that Venn diagram between disordered sleeping and disordered breathing. And so these simple things, I think, get so ignored because they're so simple, and yet just adopting the most basic, simple human habits can really enrich your life. And on so many levels, and the science is very clear about that.