During my off-hours from doing underwater research, usually late at night, I read through reams of literature on the subject. Surely someone had studied the effects of this conscious breathing on landlubbers? Surely someone had corroborated the freedivers’ fantastic stories of using breathing for weight loss, health, and longevity?
I found a library’s worth of material. The problem was, the sources were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old.
Seven books of the Chinese Tao dating back to around 400 BCE focused entirely on breathing, how it could kill us or heal us, depending on how we used it. These manuscripts included detailed instructions on how to regulate the breath, slow it, hold it, and swallow it. Even earlier, Hindus considered breath and spirit the same thing, and described elaborate practices that were meant to balance breathing and preserve both physical and mental health. Then there were the Buddhists, who used breathing not only to lengthen their lives but to reach higher planes of consciousness. Breathing, for all these people, for all these cultures, was powerful medicine.
“Therefore, the scholar who nourishes his life refines the form and nourishes his breath,” says an ancient Tao text. “Isn’t this evident?”
Not so much. I looked for some kind of verification of these claims in more recent research in pulmonology, the medical discipline that deals with the lungs and the respiratory tract, but found next to nothing. According to what I did find, breathing technique wasn’t important. Many doctors, researchers, and scientists I interviewed confirmed this position. Twenty times a minute, ten times, through the mouth, nose, or breathing tube, it’s all the same. The point is to get air in and let the body do the rest.
To get a sense of how breathing is regarded by modern medical professionals, think back to your last check-up. Chances are your doctor took your blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, then placed a stethoscope to your chest to assess the health of your heart and lungs. Maybe she discussed diet, taking vitamins, stresses at work. Any issues digesting food? How about sleep? Were the seasonal allergies getting worse? Asthma? What about those headaches?
But she likely never checked your respiratory rate. She never checked the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your bloodstream. How you breathe and the quality of each breath were not on the menu.
Even so, if the freedivers and the ancient texts were to be believed, how we breathe affects all things. How could it be so important and unimportant at the same time?
* * *
—
I kept digging, and slowly a story began to unfold. As I found out, I was not the only person who’d recently started asking these questions. While I was paging through texts and interviewing freedivers and super-breathers, scientists at Harvard, Stanford, and other renowned institutions were confirming some of the wildest stories I’d been hearing. But their work wasn’t happening in the pulmonology labs. Pulmonologists, I learned, work mainly on specific maladies of the lungs—collapse, cancer, emphysema. “We’re dealing with emergencies,” one veteran pulmonologist told me. “That’s how the system works.”
No, this breathing research has been taking place elsewhere: in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, the easy chairs of dental offices, and the rubber rooms of mental hospitals. Not the kinds of places where you’d expect to find cutting-edge research into a biological function.
Few of these scientists set out to study breathing. But, somehow, in some way, breathing kept finding them. They discovered that our capacity to breathe has changed through the long processes of human evolution, and that the way we breathe has gotten markedly worse since the dawn of the Industrial Age. They discovered that 90 percent of us—very likely me, you, and almost everyone you know—is breathing incorrectly and that this failure is either causing or aggravating a laundry list of chronic diseases.
On a more inspiring note, some of these researchers were also showing that many modern maladies—asthma, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, psoriasis, and more—could either be reduced or reversed simply by changing the way we inhale and exhale.
This work was upending long-held beliefs in Western medical science. Yes, breathing in different patterns really can influence our body weight and overall health. Yes, how we breathe really does affect the size and function of our lungs. Yes, breathing allows us to hack into our own nervous system, control our immune response, and restore our health. Yes, changing how we breathe will help us live longer.
No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how resilient our genes are, how skinny or young or wise we are—none of it will matter unless we’re breathing correctly. That’s what these researchers discovered. The missing pillar in health is breath. It all starts there.
* * *
• • •
This book is a scientific adventure into the lost art and science of breathing. It explores the transformation that occurs inside our bodies every 3.3 seconds, the time it takes the average person to inhale and exhale. It explains how the billions and billions of molecules you bring in with each breath have built your bones, sheaths of muscle, blood, brains, and organs, and the emerging science of how these microscopic bits will influence your health and happiness tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and decades from now.
I call this a “lost art” because so many of these new discoveries aren’t new at all. Most of the techniques I’ll be exploring have been around for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. They were created, documented, forgotten, and discovered in another culture at another time, then forgotten again. This went on for centuries.
Many early pioneers in this discipline weren’t scientists. They were tinkerers, a kind of rogue group I call “pulmonauts,” who stumbled on the powers of breathing because nothing else could help them. They were Civil War surgeons, French hairdressers, anarchist opera singers, Indian mystics, irritable swim coaches, stern-faced Ukrainian cardiologists, Czechoslovakian Olympians, and North Carolina choral conductors.
Few of these pulmonauts achieved much fame or respect when they were alive, and when they died their research was buried and scattered. It was even more fascinating to learn that, during the past few years, their techniques were being rediscovered and scientifically tested and proven. The fruits of this once-fringe, often forgotten research are now redefining the potential of the human body.
* * *
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But why do I need to learn how to breathe? I’ve been breathing my whole life.
This question, which you may be asking now, has been popping up ever since I began my research. We assume, at our peril, that breathing is a passive action, just something that we do: breathe, live; stop breathing, die. But breathing is not binary. And the more I immersed myself in this subject, the more personally invested I felt about sharing this basic truth.
Like most adults, I too have suffered from a host of respiratory problems in my life. That’s what landed me at the breathing class years ago. And like most people, I found that no allergy drug, inhaler, mix of supplements, or diet did much good. In the end, it was a new generation of pulmonauts who offered me a cure, and then they offered so much more.