Breath

Foreword: Take all these anecdotes for what they are, anecdotes. Lots of pseudo-science, little real science. Nonetheless interesting.

1. We inhale air, and a network of sacs in the lungs remove oxygen from the air and transfer it into the blood. Aerobic cells take oxygen from the blood and return carbon dioxide, which travel back through the veins, through the lungs, and back into the atmosphere.

Homo sapiens used to have more expansive sinus cavities and broader mouths. They likely never snored or had sleep apnea or other chronic respiratory problems because their mouths were too large and airways too wide for anything to block them. This was the case for Homo sapiens from when they appeared 300,000 years ago, to just a few hundred years ago. The change largely occurred around the Industrial Revolution.

Homo sapiens first emerged in East Africa 300,000 years ago. We were among a coterie of other human species: Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo nadeli. The rest were killed off by disease, weather, animals, and the rest.

From Homo habilis (1.7m years ago) to Homo erectus (800k years ago) to Homo sapiens (300k years ago), our brains grew in size and needed space to stretch out. It took space from the front of our faces, where our mouth, sinuses, and airways are, causing them to shrink and our noses to protrude. Bigger brain, tighter airways.

In colder climates, our noses get narrower and longer to more efficiently heat up air before it entered our lungs; our skin grew lighter to take in more sunshine. In sunny and warmer environments, we adapted wider and flatter noses which were more efficient at inhaling hot and humid air; our skin grew darker to protect us from the sun.

To accommodate vocal communication, our larynx descended in the throat. The lower larynx allowed for a wider range of vocalizations and volumes. A lower tongue allowed for easier control of sounds but caused the jaw to get pushed forward. The larynx works as a valve to shuttle food into the stomach and prevent us from inhaling food. Lowering it in the throat created too much space in the back of the mouth and made us susceptible to choking. Sapiens would become the only animals and only human species that could easily choke on food and die.

Pugs, mastiffs, boxers, and a few other dogs have been bred to have flat faces and smaller sinus cavities. They also suffer from chronic respiratory problems and modern humans are the Homo equivalent to these highly inbred dogs.

2. The body makes energy two ways: with oxygen (aerobic respiration) and without it (anaerobic respiration). Anaerobic energy is generated only with glucose, and it's quicker and easier for our bodies to access, but it's more of a backup system when our bodies don't have enough oxygen. It is 16 times less efficient than aerobic respiration. 180 minus your age is the maximum heart rate your body can withstand to stay in its aerobic state.

3. The nose clears air, heats it, and moistens it for easier absorption. Nostrils pulse to their own beat, opening and closing throughout the night, switching off between nostrils.

Crazy: the interior of the nose is blanketed with erectile tissue, the same flesh that covers the penis, clitoris, and nipples. Noses get erections. The nose is more intimately connected to the genitals than any other organ; when one gets aroused, the other responds.

The right nostril is a gas pedal. When inhaling primarily through the right nostril, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, cortisol, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. It activates your sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight mechanism. It feeds more blood to the left side of the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for logic, language, and computing.

The left nostril is a brake. It is more connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and relax side that lowers blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety. Breathing primarily through the left nostril shifts blood flow to the right side of the prefrontal cortex that is responsible for creative thought, mental abstractions and negative emotions.

After reading this I've noticed that while I'm going to bed my right nostril is closed and I breathe through my left. When I wake up the opposite is true.

In 2015, UCSD recorded breathing patterns of a schizophrenic woman over 3 years and found she had a significantly greater left nostril dominance, overstimulating the right side creative part of her brain. The researchers taught her to breathe through her right nostril and she experienced far fewer hallucinations.

Nadi shodhana is a yoga practice dedicated to manipulating the body's functions with forced breathing through nostrils, more commonly known as alternate nostril breathing.

The mucus in your nose moistens and warms your breath and is also the first line of defense. It collects inhaled debris in the nose, and moves all the junk down into the stomach where it's sterilized by stomach acid, delivered to the intestines, and then sent out of the body. The mucus moves like a conveyor belt, half an inch per minute, 60 feet per day.

This conveyor belt is pushed along by millions of cilia, tiny hair-like structures that create a coordinated wave that keeps mucus moving deeper.

George Catlin traveled all around America in the 1830s learning about indigenous tribes, publishing his experiences in a book titled The Breath of Life. His biggest takeaway: all these tribes had learned that nose breathing is essential; they taught their infants to do it by pinching their mouth during sleep. They were all tall and had near perfect teeth. He noted some would even resist smiling with an open mouth, fearing noxious air might get in.

Sinuses release a huge boost of nitric oxide, a molecule essential for circulation and oxygen delivery to cells. Viagra works by releasing nitric oxide into the bloodstream, opening capillaries.

4. The greatest indicator of life span isn't genetics, diet, or exercise. It's lung capacity. Tibetans intuited this and did stretches to increase lung capacity and life. Free divers have insanely large lung capacity through training, not genetics.

Katharina Schroth, a German woman from the early 1900s, straightened her spine by expanding her lungs through what she called orthopedic breathing. She'd twist her body and breathe into one lung, arch her chest back and forth to loosen her rib cage while breathing. After 5 years she'd effectively cured her scoliosis and spent the rest of her life teaching scoliosis patients how to cure their incurable disease through breathing and stretching. She won the Federal Cross of Merit for her contributions to medicine.

Emphysema is a gradual deterioration of lung tissue marked by chronic bronchitis or coughing. The lungs become so damaged that they can't absorb oxygen effectively. Patients are often forced to take several short breaths very fast, breathing more air than they need, but still feel out of breath.

Carl Stough was a choir conductor who believed students had weak voices because they had weak exhalations. He directed choirs at Westminster Choir College in New Jersey, churches in North Carolina, and won many national competitions. He became so renowned that he moved to New York to retrain singers at the Metropolitan Opera.

In 1958, a hospital in New Jersey called and said, "you must know something about breathing that we don't" and asked him if he was interested in training emphysema patients, a disease which had no known cure. He accepted, and realized that it was a disease of exhalation. The problem wasn't that they couldn't get fresh air into their lungs, they couldn't get enough stale air out. He noticed pillows propped behind their backs intended to help ease exhalations were actually making it worse.

He had patients hold their breaths and count from one to five as many times as possible. Then he massaged their necks, throats, and ribs and told them to inhale and exhale very slowly. He was slowly training their diaphragms, an involuntary muscle, to lift higher and drop lower. It was life changing for the patients, who were able to get a little more air in after each exercise.

Then he trained the Yale track team how to improve their breathing through exhaling and they broke PRs. Always exhale at the sound of the starter pistol so the first breath they'd take in would be rich and full and provide them energy to run faster. Then he worked with the 1968 US Olympic Team. The track team won 12 gold medals, set 6 world records, and were the only runners to not need oxygen before or after a race.

5. We have 100 times more carbon dioxide in our bodies than oxygen. Big heavy breaths deplete our bodies of CO2.

The cells in our body are fueled by oxygen. Here's how they get it: you breathe air in, which has oxygen, and it goes down your throat to a crossroads called the tracheal carina, which splits it into the right and left lungs. Then your breath gets pushed into smaller tubes called bronchioles, then it dead ends at 500 million little bulbs called alveoli. Alveoli are like little docking stations surrounded by a river of plasma filled with red blood cells. These red blood cells pass by and the oxygen slips through the alveoli's membranes and lodges itself inside a hemoglobin, a protein within the red blood cell. When blood passes through tissues and muscles, the oxygen disembarks to fuel oxygen-hungry cells. When the oxygen offloads, other passengers, namely CO2, the waste product of metabolism, hop aboard to join the return journey back to the lungs, where it can exit the body. This whole cruise takes about a minute.

Blood grows darker as oxygen leaves. For every 10 lbs of fat lost, 8.5 lbs of it comes out through the lungs. That CO2 has weight.

Danish physiologist Christian Bohr discovered CO2 loosened oxygen from hemoglobin. The reason some muscles receive more oxygen during a workout is because they are producing more CO2. Molecular supply and demand. Breathing pure oxygen doesn't even help if you're not at altitude or sick. You'll just breathe it back out if you don't have CO2 to help offload it.

Slow breathing retains CO2 and keeps blood oxygen levels high. Breathe slow.

6. Hypoventilation trains the body to do more with less. Also called hypoxic training. Breathing less is effective for treating asthma but nobody knows exactly why.

When we breathe too much, we expel too much CO2 and our blood pH rises, making it more alkaline. Breathe less, the blood pH lowers and becomes more acidic. Almost all cellular functions in the body take place at a blood pH of around 7.4, a sweet spot between alkaline and acid.

5.5 second inhales, 5.5 second exhales. The perfect breath.

7. For thousands of years, Parisians buried their dead at the center of the city in a plot of land known as the Holy Innocents' Cemetery. After hundreds of years of use, it became overcrowded. Parisian authorities instructed limestone miners to dump them into wagons and wheel them into Paris's quarries. At the turn of the 20th century, there were more than 170 miles of quarry tunnels filled with millions of skeletons.

When we began mass producing food, the food got softer and we had less to chew on. Consequently, our mouths started to deform and teeth became crooked. Chewing keeps the face and mouth structure aesthetic and also produces stem cells. Infants who were breastfed longer showed lower incidents of crooked teeth, snoring, and sleep apnea.

Masseter: chewing muscle below and in front of the ears and the strongest muscle relative to its weight.

8. The parasympathetic nervous system is sometimes called the breed and feed system because it stimulates relaxation and restoration, as well as blood flow for sex. It releases serotonin and oxytocin into your bloodstream. Many of the nerves connecting to the parasympathetic nervous system are located in the lower lobes of the lungs, which is one of the reasons long and slow breaths are so relaxing.

The sympathetic nervous system does the opposite: it sends signals to our organs telling them to get ready for action. Most of the nerves to this system are spread out at the top of the lungs.

Wim Hof's breathing method: lay on your back with a pillow under your head. Relax. Take a very deep breath into the pit of your stomach and then let it back out at the same speed. Do this for 30 cycles and on the 30th exhale, hold as long as possible without breathing. Once you need air, take a big breath and hold for 15 seconds. Move that air around the chest. Then exhale and start the deep breathing again. Repeat that whole pattern 3-4 times and add in some cold exposure.

9. The nagging need to breathe comes from a cluster of neurons at the brain stem called the central chemoreceptors. When we're breathing too slowly and carbon dioxide levels rise, the chemoreceptors monitor these changes and send alarm signals to the brain telling our lungs to breathe more. When we breathe too much, they direct us to slow down to increase carbon dioxide levels. Our body determines how fast we breathe by our carbon dioxide levels, not oxygen.

S.M. is a girl who had Urbach-Weithe disease which caused her to lose her amygdalae, the alarm circuit of fear. She had no fears. Nothing scared her. She'd approach complete strangers and tell them her most intimate sexual secrets, never afraid of embarrassment. Then scientists gave her a whiff of 30% carbon dioxide and she freaked the fuck out. It was a mechanical reaction generated by chemoreceptors instead of external psychological threats processed by the amygdalae. Anxieties and phobias are caused by an overreactive amygdalae.