Most Replayed Moment: Simple Breathing Techniques To Reduce Stress Fast! - James Nestor

00:00The Diary of a CEO is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you can save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.

00:29Is there a correlation between our health outcomes, how long we'll live, and our lung capacity, VO2 max, and all of that stuff? Is there a correlation there?

00:43So, I had the same question years ago and I started looking into it. It turns out that numerous studies have found that the healthier and larger your lungs are, the longer you will live. That is the greatest indicator of lifespan: lung size and lung health.

01:05The greatest indicator of lifespan?

01:08The greatest indicator. According to these studies, the Framingham study looked at 5,200 people over the course of 70 years, and they found that the people who lived the longest had the largest and healthiest lung function. They even did studies in which they were looking at people who had lung transplants. Surgically implanted lungs—those who were given larger lungs lived way longer than those given normal-sized or smaller lungs. So no matter how you get these larger lungs, it's better.

01:41Luckily, we don't need to get a transplant to do this. We can practice healthy breathing, we can practice stretches, we can exercise, and this naturally can keep our lung size up. It's very sad when you start looking at these charts of what happens after you're 30—you're almost there, so get ready, it's a real bummer. But your lung function starts dropping off very quickly, and especially for women around 50 and 60, your lung function and your lung size start shrinking up. This means at the time you need more oxygen more easily, it's much harder to get that, and that's where people's health really starts disintegrating; they start having problems.

02:24The good news is you can stave off this deterioration, this shrinking of your lungs, by doing all the stuff we're talking about—by doing breathwork exercises, by exercising. What is yoga but stretching and breathing into this lung and breathing into that lung? The yogis knew this thousands and thousands of years ago.

02:44It almost feels like that downward spiral is self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling. Because if my lung capacity deteriorates, my movement and my exercise capacity will deteriorate, which means my lung capacity will deteriorate, which means I'll move less. It's kind of this downward spiral, right?

03:02Absolutely. It's my belief, after studying this stuff for so long, that that is the thing you want to pay attention to more than anything else, especially as you grow older: your lung function. How much air you can pack into your lungs, how long you can hold your breath—all of this is indicative of your general respiratory function and your general health. So that little hint of using a breath hold every morning to see where you are physically and mentally, I think is good. They've used it for thousands and thousands of years and now it's coming back.

03:36This is something that a lot of these longevity experts aren't looking into. They're looking into nutrition and exercise; they're not looking into lung capacity. We get more energy from breath than we do from food and drink, right? We take 30 pounds of air in and out of our lungs every single day. And so I find it interesting they're focused on all these micronutrients—all that stuff's important, I believe most of it—but from what I know, a lot of them aren't focused very much on their breathing.

04:10I want to make sure that I have something that I can take into my own life there for the expansion of my lung capacity, because I'm sold on the importance of it. So, exercise expands my lung capacity?

04:22Yeah, 15 to 20 percent just by exercising. If you're a good exerciser, your lung capacity will stay up. Cardiovascular exercise.

04:31There are ways to access that a little more if you're dysfunctionally breathing when you're working out. You're not doing yourself too many favors. So you have to remember those simple, basic things: you have to learn how to take a proper breath, then apply that to your workouts. You will see such an incredible difference once you do this. This is what yoga is good for. It's hard to do yoga without breathing well, right? You can do it, but by virtue of all those different poses, they're meant to open up your chest, right? To expand this area.

05:05So yoga, cardiovascular exercise with proper breathing through my nose, breathwork practices at the start of the day.

05:13I think biomechanics—the first thing is awareness to any of this stuff. You can take your hands—we can do this while we're seated here—you can put them above your sit bones here.

05:25When you say low, you mean in my belly?

05:28You want your hands to be moving outwards. I don't care what's happening with your stomach. I can hold my breath and move my stomach in and out. So when people talk about a belly breath, that's not what we're doing. When your hands are moving out laterally, that means your diaphragm is descending. That's how we can see if you're taking a proper deep breath. So as you breathe in, you want your hands to be moving outward. If you take a cloth measuring tape, you can actually measure your progress this way.

05:58The next thing you want to do is take your hands, okay? Take your forefinger, place them on your collarbone, and put this one—this one's very weird—place your middle finger right there so it's only your middle finger that's touching, okay? And we're going to breathe deep, then we're going to move that breath up into our chest, okay?

06:20Don't move your shoulders. You want to see those fingers naturally separate, okay? So this is not a flexing thing. Your shoulders stay down, just like this. Fingers on the collarbone, we're going to take a big breath into our lower abdomen area, move it up, and you want your chest to be expanding outward.

06:50The last thing we want to do—take your hands, and especially you need to do this—take your hands, put them around your neck. I want you to do that same breath. You should feel zero tension in your neck. There is none of this going on, okay? It should feel soft and supple. So let's take that belly-to-chest breath. If there's any tension, do it again until there's no tension.

07:23Okay, now try that again, keeping your shoulders down, okay? Do not move your shoulders up. There's none of this going on. You're very soft, very relaxed. Take your hands above the hip bones. When you're breathing in very deep, those hands should be out like this, like wings, okay? And you're going to breathe in deep and those hands should be moving out laterally.

07:49You will start to feel those organs getting compressed—that's good, you want that. Then you can move it up one more time. So we're going to start low and we're going to move that breath up to the chest. Keep your shoulders down. Try it again, keep the shoulders down. There you go. And those fingers should be separating.

08:14So this is something that you can check in—if those hands are moving out laterally, if those hands are separating on your chest, you are taking a proper biomechanical breath. And that's what you need to focus on. You'll notice once you start learning how to access these different areas, you start applying this to working out, and your performance will tend to go up. You'll be less exhausted at the end; you'll just feel better all around.

08:45So we should expect our chest to kind of move outwards as we breathe in?

08:49You want to see your chest moving outwards because most of your lungs, the expansion is in your back, but some of that is going to be happening. This is not a pose that you want to do like this, right? You should be very loose, very limber. And when you breathe in, you want that air to fill all the way up there. But you want to start low first. That means the diaphragm is descending. Most of the air that is soaked up from the lungs and that gas exchange happens at the bottom of the lung, so you want to be able to access the bottom of those lungs.

09:25Is there a certain way that I—because when you say you want to start by breathing at the bottom, how do I know? So, the symptom of me breathing at the bottom is it coming out—my abdomen coming out on the sides?

09:42That's right. Because everyone calls this a belly breath, so people do this with their belly, but you can move your belly independently of your breathing. This is a way that you can't cheat. So a tape measure is good, and if you get an inch, inch and a half, that's pretty good. But you can work that up. And if you see really good breathers, people who have practiced a lot of yoga and done it the right way, they can have this massive expansion.

10:12This is what ties into free divers. Free divers are the experts at accessing every square inch of their lung capacity to fill it with air. That's what they do, which is why if you ever see free divers go to one of these competitions, there are short people, tall people, fat people, whatever—they all have these enormous chests because they've been able to develop this incredible lung capacity.

10:37One of the things that I think causes shallow breath is this kind of constant state of fight or flight, stress, anxiety, screens, social media. And it's funny because whenever people would have been listening to this podcast and started hearing you talk about breath, they would realize that they were probably at that exact moment doing really shallow breaths.

11:01You talk about these free divers who are able to extract, you know, use 80, 90 percent of their diaphragm or more, where you said we use roughly 10 percent?

11:10We use about 10 percent and oftentimes less than that, the average person.

11:15What is the correlation between stress and breathing? And also, I'm talking now about the everyday angst of life.

11:23So we've talked about the skeleton, we've talked about anthropology, we've talked about biomechanics and posture. But something else that ties into this, you're 100 percent right, is psychology—it is your brain. So how you breathe affects how your brain works, affects your anxiety; but your anxiety also affects how you're breathing. So again, it's another one of those circles.

11:47What happens so often is when we're at work, we're so sensitized to threats and to fear that we overreact when something happens. Even though it's not threatening our life, we get a nasty email from a friend or an email from the boss that's disappointed at the last project you did, and we get stressed out, right?

12:11So what is the physiological response to stress? It is we clench up, we hold our breath, and then we breathe like this: [panting]. And we hold our breath again, and we breathe like this: [panting]. You think about thousands of years ago when we were out in the wilds, what would we do if there was a threat approaching? You'd hold your breath to be silent, and then you breathe too much to get your respiratory system ready to either fight it off or to run away.

12:42So we're having this same response in our day-to-day lives now because we're so oversensitized to it. So researchers have different names for this. They call it "email apnea" or "continuous awareness"—I mean, there's an academic name for it, "partial attention syndrome." I prefer email apnea, easier to remember. No matter what you call it, it's the idea that when you're in the office place, you are breathing dysfunctionally because of this constant stress loop.

13:17And they've found—there were some NIH studies on this—they've found that breathing this way can have long-term damage to your health: high blood pressure issues, all the things we had talked about, metabolic dysfunctions and more. Which makes sense because you're just constantly in this loop of fear and threat and stress. So the quickest, most effective way, way more than drugs, to take control of this stress is to take control of your breathing. And this has been documented time and time again.

13:48So when you notice you're breathing this way, you stop. What I like to do is breathe two breaths in and then an exhale. It looks like this: [Inhale, inhale, long exhale]. That resets your respiratory system, that resets your breathing pattern. And then you can do a few rounds of that and go back to very simple, five seconds in, five seconds out.

14:09So let's just pretend you're in line at the airport, someone's cut you off, you ordered something at Starbucks, they gave you the wrong—you know, all the things that just drive us crazy nowadays. At that moment, I want you to breathe in, pause, breathe in again, let it out. Relax yourself a little bit when you're doing these breaths, okay?

14:38Breathe in, breathe in again, and let it out. Do that one more time. Breathe in, a little more subtle, breathe in again, and let it out. So you did this in a very exaggerated way, which is fine, but you can do this so no one can tell you're doing it. You can do it very subtle. You probably feel a little different now than you did before?

15:03Yeah, so much different.

15:05You can return to then a slow, low, rhythmic breathing pattern from there, or whatever makes you comfortable. I like five seconds in, five seconds out. Also what's beneficial for people, if it's comfortable for them, is four seconds in, six out. That will really mellow you out. We could try that right now. Breathe in—first of all, slow, I should not be seeing you breathe.

15:34Why does it matter if you see it?

15:36Because you're trying too hard. Okay, and there is a time and place for the [heavy breathing], but this is not it. Okay, right. So breathe in: 2, 3, 4. Out: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Breathe in: 2, 3, 4. Out: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. It doesn't have to be that exact pattern, but this will trigger all of that parasympathetic response in your body.

16:13You can see this if you're looking at your heart rate variability. It's amazing to see the difference that this happens just after a few breaths—looking at your HRV, looking at your heart rate, looking at your stress levels.

16:25What is it doing? You mentioned parasympathetic and resetting the respiratory system, but what is the "parasympathetic and the respiratory system for dummies"? What is that?

16:38So how you breathe is going to activate your nervous system function, and your nervous system function is going to activate everything in your body. So we can take conscious control of our breathing; we can't take conscious control of our heart rate or liver function or any of that. We can take control of our breathing. When we take control of our breathing, we can hack into our nervous system.

16:56So you can be in a sympathetic state, just like we were. You take a couple of those double inhales and exhales. Sympathetic state is the act—the fight or flight. This is the action part of your nervous system. When you're in this state, you are ready for action. And what happens—which is great, we want to be ready for action, we want to be ready to fight or run away from stuff—we do not want to be in this state all day long. Anxiety, angst, stress.

17:29Because this is where autoimmune issues and so many other problems come from, by constantly staying stressed. We want stress, we want to be able to access stress for short amounts of time, then we want to flip back into this parasympathetic, this relaxing state.

17:44If you look at, once again, animals in the wild, you even look at like a gazelle that's been attacked, you know, five minutes later, it's just sleeping. So it has a nervous system that's able to pivot from one to the other. Unfortunately, we live in an environment where we're always activating, always pushing towards that sympathetic, and it's making us sick, really, really sick.

18:06So your breathing is the quickest way of taking control of acute stress. Pills work, okay? Other modalities work. But in that moment is when you need the most help, and your breathing is the thing that can get you there.

18:22So people that have chronic stress must have awful breathing?

18:25Absolutely. And they've documented that. They've looked at their breathing, they've looked at their carbon dioxide levels, and carbon dioxide is indicative of how slow you're breathing. If your levels are very low, that means you breathe like this: [panting]. So you're just off-gassing all of this CO2, and they're always low, especially for anxiety and panic as well. They're always low, extremely low.

18:48You ask someone with acute panic or anxiety to hold their breath, this is usually what happens: [Sharp inhale, quick exhale, gasping]. "I'm never doing that again." I've seen this hundreds and hundreds of times. So by breathing slowly, you're making them more comfortable with more CO2, you're making them more comfortable with their nervous system function, with themselves. Which is why this assessment of a breath hold is very useful and so important. It's not only a diagnostic; it's a therapeutic. Because while you're holding your breath, you're also in the act of training yourself to tolerate more CO2, which will calm your body down.

19:29And going back to this point about the parasympathetic and the nervous system and anxiety, why does having an extended exhale help with anxiety? So you said breathe in for four, breathe out for six. Why does extending that exhale by two seconds help with stress and anxiety?

19:47So if you really pay attention—and a lot of people have problems doing this, which is why it's helpful for them to look at their Whoop or Oura or whatever—you can place your hand over your heart. And when you inhale, you can feel your heart rate increase. And when you exhale, it slows down.

20:08This is how HRV works. This is how it's calculated: it is the difference in time on that, and the shortest distance to the longest difference. And this is looking at your nervous system function—respiratory sinus arrhythmia. So how you breathe affects how many times your heart beats, right?

20:28So if you're exhaling, which slows the heart rate down, more, what's going to happen to your heart rate? It's going to start slowing down more. And that exhale, that slowing down and telling your body you're in a safe place that it can relax, is what triggers this response by the nervous system.

20:46Interesting. So it's like tricking the body into believing that...

20:48It is such a simple hack. And a lot of people say, "Oh, this can't be true." But so many of us have these wearables. You can check it for yourself and in real time to look at your heart rate variability changing your breathing pattern. Look at your blood pressure, too. For many people, they can just switch their breathing—after a couple of minutes, you can see drops of 15 points. Not for everybody, but for some people, 10 to 15 points just by switching your breathing.

21:13What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.

21:28The Diary of a CEO is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you can save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.

21:57The Diary of a CEO is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you can save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.