Nasal Breathing

How to Nasal Breath 

Nasal breathing is super simple. Just like it sounds, breathe through you nose.  DONE.  Blog entry over.  

 One of my favorite saying is: “the best solutions are the simplest but are also the hardest to implement”. 

First, let’s discuss why nasal breathing even matters.  Then we’ll dig into why is it good for you and how can you do it more.  

I’ve heard about the benefits from nasal breathing for years.  I dug into the subject with my man James Nestor and his book Breath. 

In the book Nestor and a friend of his, Anders Olsson did a 20 day experiment with Stanford’s Chief of Rhinology Dr. Jayakar Nayak.  If you want to read the detailed account of the experiment Read his book Breath.  The short version is: they plugged their noses for 10 days and breathed only through their mouths.  They took blood samples, measured heart rate, respiratory rate, sleep quantity and quality as well as anecdotal evidence of how they felt.  Let’s just say that 10 day of breathing through their mouths produced some horrible health results.  

A Couple of bad statics about mouth breathing:

-It causes you to loose 40% more water and become dehydrated quicker

-Causes you to produce fewer brain cells essentially making you dumber

-Is a cause or contributing factor in snoring and sleep apnea 

-Increases resting heart rate 

-Increases blood pressure 

And these are just the tip of the iceberg. 

After 10 days both Nestor and Olsson felt terrible. 

The nose plugs were removed and Nestor and Olsson started nasal breathing all day, nasal breathing during exercise and taping their mouths shut at night (more on this to come in the future).  

Both experience a marked improvement on their physical health which included:

-Decreased resting heart rate

-Decreased blood pressure

-Better Sleep 

-Decreased respiratory rate 

They felt physically and mentally better.  

These are also just the tip of the iceberg.  

Nasal breathing on it’s own is an exhaustive and complicated topic.  A few of the simple reasons to grasp for me were that nasal breathing purifies the air, decreased the air pressure coming into your lungs and humidifies the air.  The kicker for me was that nasal breathing releases nitric oxide and can increase the amount of nitric oxide by 6 times.  Nitric oxide is a vasodilator meaning is open up the blood vessels and capillaries.  

Some common medications that do this are nitroglycerin that’s used for people with heart conditions.  It works on the same principle introducing nitric oxide into the blood stream and opens or dilates the bodies arteries. 

Another well known drug that introduces nitric oxide is Viagra.  Viagra opens the capillaries in the the body and more specifically the genitals to archives the desired result.  

The fact that we can increase a “drug” into our cardio vascular system through our respiratory system to improve our bodies ability to function on all levels and it’s free we just have to shut our mouths.  To me that’s and incredible return on investment.  But like I said at the beginning, it’s simple but difficult to actually do because it’s easier to not do it.  

The most impressive things that I take away from the Nestor Olsson experiment was how quickly their bodies responded.  It only took a few days for their health to plummet when they were only breathing through their mouths.  A habit that too many of us participate in.  But in contrast it only took them a couple of days to start seeing improvements when they switched to nasal breathing.  Within 10 days they had come back to and improvement past their baselines.  Both in general health and more specific their physical/respiratory performance as related to aerobic exercise.

Our bodies were created to be able to heal. Heal from acute as well as chronic health problems.  Yesterday I cut my thumb while trying to build a bird house.  A nice clean 1 inch slice down my thumb.  Now my body “miraculously” knows what to do to heal that cut.  I think that’s incredible.  But there are also other factors when it comes to healing.  It will heal quick if kept moist and covered.  If I increase my hydration it will heal quicker.  Conversely if I don’t keep it clean I open myself up to infection and a longer healing time. Within a few days my body has gone down the path of healing that cut to the point that in a week I will have no evidence of that wound.  

I learn by doing and seeing.  I find that example of a healing cut to be useful when thinking about healing or more specifically improving/healing internal health.  The fact Nestor and Olsson could change some seemingly small breathing habits and see such a remarkable change in their overall health in such a short amount of time causes me to pause and think that pursuing small habit changes, that being the way we breathe can produce significant positive outcomes.  

Breathing….. it’s the first thing we do in life.  It’s also the last thing we do before we die.  We breath all day every day.  Then when we go to sleep our body continues breathe despite us not actively or consciously participating.  It’s the only thing we do all the time and most of us never give it s second thought.  We don’t think about it like something that we can train, improve or become an expert in.  But reading the evidence of Nestor and Olsson’s experiment gives me all the more fuel to continue to improve my life through the breathe, and more special the breathe through the nose.  

Simple but difficult.

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DEEP BREATH…Hold…Exhale

Darren