154: How Changing How You Breathe Can Change Your Life | James Nestor

It's chronic, habitual mouth breathing that is so bad for our health .. When we breathe through our noses, we humidify air, we heat it, and we condition it so that by the time it reaches our lungs, it's treated—it's purified in some ways. When you breathe through your mouth... you get none of those benefits. You can think of the lungs as an external organ when you're breathing through the mouth—they're just exposed to allergens, and pollution, and whatever viruses, whatever else is in the air. Our nose is our first line of defense against all these things.

There are links, direct links, between erectile dysfunction and a decrease in the production of nitric oxide. There are links between diabetes, type 2 diabetes. This goes on and on and on. You really need a lot of nitric oxide in your body all the time, and breathing through your nose is a way of helping your body do that.

When we breathe just into our chest—and we breathe about 18 times a minute, which is on the upper end of average, but so many people breathe this way—we only use 50% of that oxygen we take in ... Just a little bit of it actually makes it to the lungs and participates in gas exchange. But when we breathe slowly at a rate of about 6 times a minute, we use 85% of our breath—so a 35% increase in efficiency.

Think about when you go to your doctor—they check your blood pressure, they ask if you have any anxiety, they ask maybe about your sexual performance, they ask you about migraines, but they don't ever talk to you about your breathing. They don't look at your levels of O2 or CO2. But breathing is the anchor to so many of those issues. And if you fix your breathing... you can really blunt the symptoms, or in some extraordinary cases, heal yourself of those chronic problems.

75% of the population has a deviated septum. Some people have a very deviated septum, and then, absolutely, septoplasty can really help them. But a lot of people just have a slight deviation in their septum where if they follow healthy breathing habits, that can have an outsized effect on their ability to nasal breath.

70% of the population sleeps with an open mouth.

Your posture dictates how you breathe, and your breathing dictates your posture.