Breath

Tags: #books #non-fiction #health #body #air #breathing #nose

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about breathing and how to most effectively breathe. It is basically an endorsement of nose breathing and guides on how to effectively breathe through your nose. The book is a collection of experiences from across the globe about breathing.

🎨 Impressions

I liked the book, although I must say that a lot of the points in the book where quite dramatic and unsubstantiated by science. It was sometimes a bit enthusiastic and it was no end to the calamities it could cure, just by breathing through the nose. It was interesting to hear about the nose and how it works.

After being in Singapore for 6 months, I feel like it is strange for me to think of how congested my nose used to be. Might be something to think about and get back to next flu season.

How I Discovered It

I got it recommened on Hacker News.

Who Should Read It?

In think all people who snore should read it. And people who have issues with their sleeping. It provieds interesting insights although my bullshit alarm rang quite frequently.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

Much more concious about my breathing. I am also incliende to tape my moouth when sleeping to see if i have any imporvements in snoring/sleeping patters. Curious on how to measure this.

✍️ My Top Quotes

By the law of averages, you will take 670 million breaths in your lifetime.
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.
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.
Oxygen, it turned out, produced 16 times more energy than carbon dioxide. Aerobic life forms used this boost to evolve, to leave the sludge-covered rocks behind and grow larger and more complex.
The skulls ranged from 200 to thousands of years old. They were part of the Morton Collection, named after a racist scientist named Samuel Morton, who, starting in the 1830s, collected skeletons in a failed attempt to prove the superiority of the Caucasian race.
We began to look less like apes and more like people. If you could take a Homo erectus, dress him in a Brooks Brothers suit, and put him on a subway, he probably wouldn’t draw a second glance. These ancient ancestors were genetically similar enough to possibly have our children.
Last night, in my first run of self-inflicted nasal obstructed sleeping, my snoring increased by 1, percent, to 75 minutes through the night. Olsson’s numbers were even worse. He went from zero to four hours, ten minutes. I’d also suffered a fourfold increase in sleep apnea events. All this, in just 24 hours.
When we run our cells aerobically with oxygen, we gain some 16 times more energy efficiency over anaerobic. The key for exercise, and for the rest of life, is to stay in that energy-efficient, clean-burning, oxygen-eating aerobic zone for the vast majority of time during exercise and at all times during rest.
My snoring has increased 4, percent from ten days ago. For the first time that I’m aware of, I’m beginning to suffer fromobstructive sleep apnea. At my worst, I’ve averaged 25 “apnea events,” meaning I was choking so severely that my oxygen levels dropped to below 85 percent.
Whenever oxygen falls below 90 percent, the blood can’t carry enough of it to support body tissues. If this goes on too long, it can lead to heart failure, depression, memory problems, and early death.
There are several books that describe the horrendous health effects of snoring and sleep apnea. They explain how these afflictions lead to bed-wetting, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, and so on.
This happens because the nose is more intimately connected to the genitals than any other organ; when one gets aroused, the other responds. The mere thought of sex for some people causes such severe bouts of nasal erections that they’ll have trouble breathing and will start to sneeze uncontrollably, an inconvenient condition called “honeymoon rhinitis.” As sexual stimulation weakens and erectile tissue becomes flaccid, the nose will, too.
Crustaceans use their elaborately designed shells to filter impurities and keep invaders out. So do we.
The lower turbinates at the opening of the nostrils are covered in that pulsing erectile tissue, itself covered in mucous membrane, a nappy sheen of cells that moistens and warms breath to your body temperature while simultaneously filtering out particles and pollutants. All these invaders could cause infection and irritation if they got into the lungs; the mucus is the body’s “first line of defense.”
The popular erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil, known by the commercial name Viagra, works by releasing nitric oxide into the bloodstream, which opens the capillaries in the genitals and elsewhere.
The lungs themselves will lose about 12 percent of capacity from the age of 30 to 50, and will continue declining even faster as we get older, with women faring worse than men. If we make it to 80, we’ll be able to take in 30 percent less air than we did in our 20s. We’re forced to breathe faster and harder. This breathing habit leads to chronic problems like high blood pressure, immune disorders, and anxiety.
Normally, the blood coursing through our arteries and veins at any one time does a full circuit once a minute, an average of 2, gallons of blood a day.
Stough had expected these elite athletes to have exemplary breathing habits. Instead, he found that they suffered from the same “respiratory weakness” as everyone else: they got the same colds and flus and lung infections. Most of them breathed way too often, high in their chests. Sprinters were the worst off. The short and violent breaths they took during runs put too much pressure on delicate tissues and bronchial tubes. As a result, they suffered from asthma and other respiratory ailments. At the finish line, they coughed and sometimes vomited and collapsed, wheezing in pain.
Searched through the current treatments for the nearly 4 million Americans now suffering from emphysema. There were bronchodilators, steroids, and antibiotics. There was supplemental oxygen and surgery and something called pulmonary rehabilitation, which included assistance to quit smoking,
In these interviews, he championed the therapeutic effects of nasal breathing and beseeched audiences with the same message of slow breathing.
turned out that the most efficient breathing rhythm occurred when both the length of second inhales followed by 5.-second exhales, which works out almost exactly to 5. breaths a minute. This was the same pattern of the rosary.
Seventy percent of the U.S. population is considered overweight; one in three are obese. There’s no doubt we are eating more than we did in the past.
In Japan, legend has it that samurai would test a soldier’s readiness by placing a feather beneath his nostrils while he inhaled and exhaled. If the feather moved, the soldier would be dismissed.
Training the body to breathe less actually increases VOmax, which can not only boost athletic stamina but also help us live longer and healthier lives.
It would become known as hypoventilation training. Hypo, which comes from the Greek for “under” (as in hypodermic needle), is the opposite of hyper, meaning “over.” The concept of hypoventilation training was to breathe less.
In the decades since Buteyko first started training patients to breathe less, asthma has become a global epidemic. Nearly million Americans now suffer from it—that’s about 8 percent of the population, and a fourfold increase since 1980. Asthma is the leading cause of emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and missed school days for children. It is considered a controllable but incurable disease.
Asthma is an immune system sensitivity that provokes constriction and spasms in the airways. Pollutants, dust, viral infections, cold air, and more can all lead to attacks. But asthma can be brought on by overbreathing, which is why it’s so common during physical exertion, a condition called exercise-induced asthma that affects around 15 percent of the population and up to 40 percent of athletes.
By around 1500, the farming that had begun in Southwest Asia and the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years earlier took over the world. The human population grew to a half billion, 100 times what it had been at the dawn of agriculture.
Researchers have suspected that industrialized food was shrinking our mouths and destroying our breathing for as long as we’ve been eating this way.**
The same story played out no matter where he went. Societies that replaced their traditional diet with modern, processed foods suffered up to ten times more cavities, severely crooked teeth, obstructed airways, and overall poorer health.
Farther down is the neck. Thicker necks cramp airways. Men with neck circumferences of more than 17 inches, and women with necks larger than 16 inches, have a significantly increased risk of airway obstruction. The more weight you gain, the higher your risk of suffering from snoring and sleep apnea, although body mass index is only one of many factors. Weight lifters frequently deal with sleep apnea and chronic breathing problems; instead of layers of fat, they have muscles crowding the airways. Plenty of rail-thin distance runners and even infants suffer, too.
Gelb and his colleagues sometimes remove tonsils and adenoids. This can be especially effective for children: 50 percent of kids with ADHD were shown to no longer have symptoms after having their adenoids and tonsils removed.
It just meant holding the lips together, teeth lightly touching, with your tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck. When sitting or standing, the spine should form a J-shape—perfectly straight until it reaches the small of the back, where it naturally curves outward. While maintaining this posture, we should always breathe slowly through the nose into the abdomen.
To some researchers, it’s no coincidence that eight of the top ten most common cancers affect organs cut off from normal blood flow during extended states of stress.
Eighteen percent of Americans suffer from some form of anxiety or panic, with these numbers rising every year. Perhaps the best step in treating them, and hundreds of millions of others around the world, was by first conditioning the central chemoreceptors and the rest of the brain to become more flexible to carbon dioxide levels. By teaching anxious people the art of holding their breath.
Up to 80 percent of office workers (according to one estimate) suffer from something called continuous partial attention. We’ll scan our email, write something down, check Twitter, and do it all over again, never really focusing on any specific task. In this state of perpetual distraction, breathing becomes shallow and erratic. Sometimes we won’t breathe at all for a half minute or longer. The problem is serious enough that the National Institutes of Health has enlisted several researchers, including Dr. David Anderson and Dr. Margaret Chesney, to study its effects over the past decades. Chesney told me that the habit, also known as “email apnea,” can contribute to the same maladies as sleep apnea.
The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 5. seconds, then exhale for 5. seconds. That’s 5. breaths a minute for a total of about 5. liters of air. You can practice this perfect breathing for a few minutes, or a few hours. There is no such thing as having too much peak efficiency in your body.
Nitric oxide is a powerhouse molecule that widens capillaries, increases oxygenation, and relaxes the smooth muscles. Humming increases the release of nitric oxide in the nasal passages 15-fold. There is the most effective, and simple, method for increasing this essential gas.
Walk or run for a minute or so while breathing normally through the nose. Exhale and pinch the nose closed while keeping the same pace. When you sense a palpable air hunger, release the nose and breathe very gently, at about half of what feels normal for about 10 to 15 seconds. Return to regular breathing for 30 seconds. Repeat for about ten cycles.
Decongest the Nose Sit up straight and exhale a soft breath, then pinch both nostrils shut. Try to keep your mind off the breathholding; shake your head up and down or side to side; go for a quick walk, or jump and run. Once you feel a very potent sense of air hunger, take a very slow and controlled breath in through the nose. (If the nose is still congested, breathe softly through the mouth with pursed lips.) Continue this calm, controlled breathing for at least 30 seconds to 1 minute. Repeat all these steps six times.
Falim, a Turkish brand, is as tough as shoe leather and each piece lasts for about an hour. I’ve found the Sugarless Mint to be the most palatable. (Other flavors, such as Carbonate, Mint Grass, and sugar-filled varieties, tend to be softer and grosser.) Mastic gum, which comes from the resin of the evergreen shrub Pistacia lentiscus, has been cultivated in the Greek islands for thousands of years.
Box Breathing Navy SEALs use this technique to stay calm and focused in tense situations. It’s simple. Inhale to a count of 4; hold 4; exhale 4; hold 4. Repeat.
4-- Breathing This technique, made famous by Dr. Andrew Weil, places the body into a state of deep relaxation. I use it on long flights to help fall asleep. Take a breath in, then exhale through your mouth with a whoosh sound. Close the mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four. Hold for a count of seven. Exhale completely through your mouth, with a whoosh, to the count of eight. Repeat this cycle for at least four breaths.