Breath follows James Nestor’s journey to understand his own obstructed airways and how it is that humans evolved from having perfect breathing and straight teeth to being chronic mouth breathers with crooked teeth and sufferers of snoring, sleep apnea, asthma and other illnesses. The answer I took away was that soft foods (cooked and processed) had a negative impact on chewing and jaw development, which affected the shape of our palette and airways. Stress, along with these evolutionary changes, affects our ability to have deep nasal breaths, and we have developed patterns that have us involuntarily holding our breath or breathing too fast or too often.
Nestor outlines the connection between breathing and health as he takes readers on his own journey of breath research.
My two takeaways: 1) chew more and more often, 2) breathe 5 1/2 seconds in and then 5 1/2 seconds out as an optimal breathing pattern.
And apparently, the left nostril is your parasympathetic nervous system and the right is the sympathetic nervous system. You can mindfully trigger fight-or-flight as a way to warm up your body (plug the left and breath through the right). Or you can mindfully trigger a calm state by using the left only.
James Nestor has a number of resources on his website and youtube.
If you liked Outlive or Good Energy, this is another great addition to that library of health titles worth reading.