The Breathing Expert: Breathing Through Your Mouth Can Cause ADHD, Diabetes & Child Sickness! (Must Listen): James Nestor

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**James Nestor** (0:30)
You can exercise all you want, eat all the right food, sleep eight hours a night. If you are not breathing right, you will always be sick.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:39)
James Nestor, international bestseller on breathing.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:43)
As a species, we've largely lost the ability to breathe correctly. James travels the whole world trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

**James Nestor** (0:51)
99% of people are breathing dysfunctionally. They don't realize the damage they're doing to their bodies and brains by being this way. Look at the way we sit all day long, the way we sleep, the way we eat. The modern world is conspiring to make us sick. Diabetes, asthma, metabolic and autoimmune issues, anxiety, even ADHD. Experts said it is 100% related to your breathing at night especially.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:18)
Really?

**James Nestor** (1:19)
Bad breathing habits are a recipe for disaster, which is what has happened for so many kids today.
So if you're a parent and if you can hear them breathing when they're sleeping, this is a big red flag. But I believe that everybody can become a good breeder and these steps are free. We can do this while we're seated here. So the first thing is to...

**Steven Bartlett** (1:40)
Carbon dioxide is seen as this poison. Why?

**James Nestor** (1:43)
Levels over 800 into 1000 can have serious issues with cognitive and physical functions. I've been recording our CO2 during this interview.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:52)
It's going up.

**James Nestor** (1:53)
And if we were to continue working in here for the next few hours, you will...

**Steven Bartlett** (1:58)
Jesus.
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James, of all the things you could have committed your life to, you could have committed a decade of work and effort to, you decided to commit it to the subject matter of breath and breathing. Why?

**James Nestor** (3:03)
It was a number of things that happened personally, professionally. Over a number of years, I never set out to write a book about breathing. What a boring subject, right?
Until I started having breathing problems that came back year after year. I surf a lot in San Francisco, so I was getting bronchitis. I was getting pneumonia, mild pneumonia. It was nothing to worry about. I'd go to my doctor, I'd be given a pack of pills and sent on my way. This kept happening year after year until a doctor friend of mine was looking at me. We were out having a drink and she's like, I think there's something going on with your breathing. It's a breathing.
This is just something we do automatically. It's nothing I considered. She's like, oh, you might want to go to a breathwork class.
I went to a breathwork class and it completely blew me away on a number of levels.
I was able to get over the respiratory problems I had. I don't write about this in the book because I didn't want to make my experience be indicative of everyone else's experience. But all the issues I had completely went away, 100%. And so I started looking into this more just personally, what else I could learn about breathing and how it could benefit me for athletic performance, for sleep and more, and notice that my health was changing in all the right ways, over and over again when I was adopting different habits. So that was more than 10 years ago, actually, that was probably 12 years ago. And then I started writing about freedivers, started freediving myself and learning the limits of breathing and how you can do things that are supposed to be scientifically impossible by harnessing the power of your breath. That's what really got me interested as a science journalist.