Forty percent of today’s population suffers from chronic nasal obstruction, and around half of us are habitual mouthbreathers, with females and children suffering the most. The causes are many: dry air to stress, inflammation to allergies, pollution to pharmaceuticals. But much of the blame, I’ll soon learn, can be placed on the ever-shrinking real estate in the front of the human skull.
When mouths don’t grow wide enough, the roof of the mouth tends to rise up instead of out, forming what’s called a V-shape or high-arched palate. The upward growth impedes the development of the nasal cavity, shrinking it and disrupting the delicate structures in the nose. The reduced nasal space leads to obstruction and inhibits airflow. Overall, humans have the sad distinction of being the most plugged-up species on Earth.
I should know. Before probing my nasal cavities, Nayak took an X-ray of my head, which provided a deli-slicer view of every nook and cranny in my mouth, sinuses, and upper airways.
“You’ve got some . . . stuff,” he said. Not only did I have a V-shape palate, I also had “severe” obstruction to the left nostril caused by a “severely” deviated septum. My sinuses were also riddled with a profusion of deformities called concha bullosa. “Super uncommon,” said Nayak. It was a phrase nobody wants to hear from a doctor.
My airways were such a mess that Nayak was amazed I hadn’t suffered from even more of the infections and respiration problems I’d known as a kid. But he was reasonably certain I could expect some degree of serious breathing problems in the future.
Over the next ten days of forced mouthbreathing, I’ll be putting myself inside a kind of mucousy crystal ball, amplifying and hastening the deleterious effects on my breathing and my health, which will keep getting worse as I get older. I’ll be lulling my body into a state it already knows, that half the population knows, only multiplying it many times.
“OK, hold steady,” Nayak says. He grabs a steel needle with a wire brush at the end, about the size of a mascara brush. I’m thinking, He’s not going to put that thing up my nose. A few seconds later, he puts that thing up my nose.
I watch through the video goggles as Nayak maneuvers the brush deeper. He keeps sliding until it is no longer up my nose, no longer playing around my nasal hair, but wiggling inside of my head a few inches deep. “Steady, steady,” he says.
When the nasal cavity gets congested, airflow decreases and bacteria flourish. These bacteria replicate and can lead to infections and colds and more congestion. Congestion begets congestion, which gives us no other option but to habitually breathe from the mouth. Nobody knows how soon this damage occurs. Nobody knows how quickly bacteria accumulate in an obstructed nasal cavity. Nayak needs to grab a culture of my deep nasal tissue to find out.
I wince as I watch him twist the brush deeper still, then spin it, skimming off a layer of gunk. The nerves this far up the nose are designed to feel the subtle flow of air and slight modulations in air temperature, not steel brushes. Even though he’s dabbed an anesthetic in there, I can still feel it. My brain has a hard time knowing exactly what to do, how to react. It’s difficult to explain, but it feels like someone is needling a conjoined twin that exists somewhere outside of my own head.
“The things you never thought you’d be doing with your life,” Nayak laughs, putting the bleeding tip of the brush into a test tube. He’ll compare the 200,000 cells from my sinuses with another sample ten days from now to see how nasal obstruction affects bacterial growth. He shakes the test tube, hands it to his assistant, and politely asks me to take the video goggles off and make room for his next patient.
Patient #2 is leaning against the window and snapping photos with his phone. He’s 49 years old, deeply tanned with white hair and Smurf-blue eyes, and he’s wearing spotless beige jeans and leather loafers without socks. His name is Anders Olsson, and he’s flown 5,000 miles from Stockholm, Sweden. Along with me, he’s ponied up more than $5,000 to join the experiment.
I’d interviewed Olsson several months ago after coming across his website. It had all the red flags of flakiness: stock images of blond women striking hero poses on mountaintops, neon colors, frantic use of exclamation points, and bubble fonts. But Olsson wasn’t some fringe character. He’d spent ten years collecting and conducting serious scientific research. He’d written dozens of posts and self-published a book explaining breathing from the subatomic level on up, all annotated with hundreds of studies. He’d also become one of Scandinavia’s most respected and popular breathing therapists, helping to heal thousands of patients through the subtle power of healthy breathing.
When I mentioned during one of our Skype conversations that I would be mouthbreathing for ten days during an experiment, he cringed. When I asked if he wanted to join in, he refused. “I do not want to,” he declared. “But I am curious.”
Now, months later, Olsson plops his jet-lagged body onto the examination chair, puts on the video glasses, and inhales one of his last nasal breaths for the next 240 hours. Beside him, Nayak twirls the steel endoscope the way a heavy metal drummer handles a drumstick. “OK, lean your head back,” says Nayak. A twist of the wrist, a crane of the neck, and he goes deep.
The experiment is set up in two phases. Phase I consists of plugging our noses and attempting to live our everyday lives. We’ll eat, exercise, and sleep as usual, only we’ll do it while breathing only through our mouths. In Phase II, we’ll eat, drink, exercise, and sleep like we did during Phase I, but we’ll switch the pathway and breathe through our noses and practice a number of breathing techniques throughout the day.
Between phases we’ll return to Stanford and repeat all the tests we’ve just taken: blood gases, inflammatory markers, hormone levels, smell, rhinometry, pulmonary function, and more. Nayak will compare data sets and see what, if anything, changed in our brains and bodies as we shifted our style of breathing.
I’d gotten a fair share of gasps from friends when I told them about the experiment. “Don’t do it!” a few yoga devotees warned. But most people just shrugged. “I haven’t breathed out of my nose in a decade,” said a friend who had suffered allergies most of his life. Everyone else said the equivalent of: What’s the big deal? Breathing is breathing.
Is it? Olsson and I will spend the next 20 days finding out.
* * *
• • •
A while back, some 4 billion years ago, our earliest ancestors appeared on some rocks. We were small then, a microscopic ball of sludge. And we were hungry. We needed energy to live and proliferate. So we found a way to eat air.
The atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide then, not the best fuel, but it worked well enough. These early versions of us learned to take this gas in, break it down, and spit out what was left: oxygen. For the next billion years, the primordial goo kept doing this, eating more gas, making more sludge, and excreting more oxygen.