Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with James Nestor (@MrJamesNestor), a science journalist and the author of the international bestseller Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, with more than three million copies sold in 44 languages. Breath was named the Best General Nonfiction Book by the American Society of Journalists and Authors and was a finalist for Science Book of the Year at the Royal Society.
He is also the author of Deep: Free Diving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves and Get High Now (Without Drugs).
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
James Nestor — Breathing Protocols to Reboot Your Health, Fix Your Sleep, and Boost Performance
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Tim Ferriss: James, so nice to see you and hear you. Thanks for making the time.
James Nestor: Thanks for having me.
Tim Ferriss: And I must tell you a bit of background to begin. I remember when Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art first came out and I don’t know if I’ve ever had, maybe Deep Survival would be another one, I believe, but two books that have come at me from so many different vectors, from so many friends, from so many athletes, from so many doctors. And I thought to myself, “You know what? This is fascinating. I’m already really, really captured by the subject matter, but I want to let this slow bake for a while and then come back and talk to James after it’s saturated the global populace a bit, and talk about the stories, what has stuck, what he’s using personally.” And so here we are. We did it.
James Nestor: Perfect timing. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Perfect timing. And in the course of doing prep for this came across a name, Maurice Dubar. My French is rusty, but I believe I’m getting that probably 50% right. Would you mind explaining who Maurice is and why Maurice is relevant?
James Nestor: When I was first trying to research the benefit of hyperventilation breathwork practices and sort of get a deeper story into how they worked and who was doing them, I ran across this guy that completely randomly at an event, and he told me about this mysterious 90-year-old who had spent hours in the snow and swimming in frozen lakes up in the French Alps. And this was not Wim Hof, this was a predecessor of Wim Hof who has been doing this for 50, 60 years. And so I was able to contact him and learn about his path into this world and learn about how rehabilitating it was for his own health and the other people that came to see him. And I thought it was interesting that there is a long legacy of people who have been doing these things, just like most things, right? But they’re usually hidden beneath a few layers and you have to dig a bit to get there. But he’s a fascinating guy. Sadly he passed away at 93 years old and did this almost every day as often as he could.
Tim Ferriss: How did he get to the breathwork? What is his story?
James Nestor: He was extremely sick as a child, had various lung infections, various respiratory disorders, and he was slated for surgery. They were going to remove a large part of his lungs. And at that time, a missionary came in to see him and said, “Hey, I was just in the far East and I heard about this thing called yoga.” And he said, “Well, what’s yoga?” He said, “Let me tell you about it.” And he showed him some breathing techniques. So Dubar said, “I don’t want to do the surgery yet. Give me a few weeks to try to rehabilitate myself.” And everyone thought he was crazy. And not only did he rehabilitate himself, he gained this almost superhuman strength by adopting these breathing practices. And that was in the 1950s. So that’s how far ahead of the curve this guy was.
Tim Ferriss: And what was he actually doing in the sense that in the course of reading up on this guy a little bit at 71, he toured the Himalayas on his bike at an elevation of 5,000 meters. He could sit in ice water effectively for 55 minutes, ran 150 miles beneath the sun in the Sahara Desert. And it seems like these stories, if you follow the ET Reese’s peanut butter bits back lead to something called Tummo. I’m sure I’m pronouncing that incorrectly, but that seems to be the spelling at least, T-U-M-M-O. What differentiates that from different or other forms of breathing?
James Nestor: Tummo is an ancient breathwork practice from the Bon Buddhist that allows you to both generate heat in your body and store it. So this is what the monks have used in the Himalayas for thousands of years reportedly to help keep themselves warm. So it was a survival technique, and depending on who you talk to, some people say, “Oh, it’s very religious, very spiritual.” Other people say it’s very practical, it’s just a practical thing. And you can learn this. It’s a mechanical skill that you can learn. Where it gets a bit more fuzzy is what is Tummo? What is officially Tummo? What is the saccharin version of Tummo? Is Wim Hof version Tummo?
And I try not to get into the weeds too much in the book, but basically there are two different versions. There’s the traditional type in which you breathe very slowly and you reduce your metabolism and somehow the heat in your body goes up. Shouldn’t be possible. There it is. And then there’s the other type which I guess isn’t officially Tummo, but people still call it Tummo, which is the Wim Hof style breathing, the extremely intense hyperventilation techniques followed by breath holds and building pressure in your body.
Tim Ferriss: Tummo Lite, register trademark.
James Nestor: Yeah, you know what? I think it’s still available.
Tim Ferriss: I have all the URLs, guys, I’m squatting on them if you want any.
James Nestor: There you go.
Tim Ferriss: And in the case of Tummo, is that something that you have personally experimented with or have you left that on the shelf?
James Nestor: I’ve done the commercial version of it many times. I still do it today. It absolutely works. If you are cold, if you’re in the ocean, if you’re in the snow, wherever you are, if you’re cold, you can do this and you can jack your body temperature very, very quickly. The slower one is a much better kept secret. You’re not going to find too many instructions for it. I’ve talked to a few Bon Buddhist monks about this and they kind of smile and say, “Oh, maybe if you hang out with us for another 10 years and spend some time in the Himalayas,” which has not been possible. But I do know some dedicated breathwork people that have gone the various levels deep into this and are now getting hints about it. But now they won’t tell me because they say, “I’ve got a secret. You’ve got to do the work.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the fight club of breathwork.
James Nestor: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Most folks don’t want to do the Jiro Dreams of Sushi route with the breathwork, I suppose. But in the case of what you’re practicing, would it be then akin to what Wim Hof would promote in terms of the breathwork or could you describe what it is that you do for folks just in brief?
James Nestor: Sure. So the Wim Hof method is about 30 very deep breaths, extremely deep breaths and quick repetition followed by a breath hold at a neutral position. And then you take one big breath in, hold for 30 seconds and go back to that cycle, and you do this over and over and over. So the Tummo version of this is learning the commercial Tummo Lite, L-I-T-E, register trademark is you do those same motions, but when you’re doing the breath hold, you are holding the breath in and you’re creating a pressure in your body. You’re also doing some different arm movements with it. So it’s almost like you’re creating compression. It’s almost like a piston that your diaphragm is a piston and you’re creating that compression. And I’ll be damned if someone does this and doesn’t break out into a sweat, and it doesn’t matter how cold you are. I’ve seen it time and time again and anyone that’s done Wim Hof can attest to it as well.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think, somebody on the Internet’s going to fact check me, but I think the first large public interview that Wim Hof ever did was on this podcast, it’s a hundred years ago. I will say for folks who dive into that rabbit hole, be very cautious about the cold exposure. There are lots of documented cases of frostbite and people losing digits and so on. So don’t immediately go out and hike barefoot up to elevation up to your knees in snow, just watch that and never practice this stuff in water also. What does your personal development journey look like with breathwork? I guess another way to frame that and ask it more simply is what has breathwork done for you? What have the outcomes looked like for you?
James Nestor: I think the main outcome was at the beginning where it made me realize that there are many more things you can do with your body to improve your health and focus on food and exercise and sleep. And those are the three big things that a lot of people have been talking about for good reason. There are absolutely essential. But I had all of those things pretty well dialed in around 12 years ago now, it’s quite a long time ago. I was eating the right foods, I was sleeping eight hours, I was exercising all the time, and I had chronic respiratory issues just constantly. This was when I was in San Francisco where I had been for a couple of decades. So I was surfing a lot, but constantly getting pneumonia, constantly getting bronchitis. And I would go to my doctor and the doctor, I didn’t know better at this time, would give me antibiotics.
The Z-Pak, I would take them because I was extremely naive. And this went on for years and years until these respiratory problems became so bad that I could actually hear myself breathing at night. When I was working out I could hear there was something very deeply wrong with my respiration. And it was from a suggestion of a good doctor friend of mine who was looking at me and she said, “You need to do breath work.” And before then, I’d never done any breath work. I had heard about it because I lived in San Francisco, but I had no interest in it. And the short version of this very long story is I did it and I haven’t had one of those issues since. And so that convinced me that there was a signal here to pursue when there could be real data and science behind it. It wasn’t just some placebo thing as I had been told. It was a real biological function that you could focus on.
Tim Ferriss: What strikes me so strongly about breathing also is that you have an autonomous function that you can also control. So it’s this sort of API, this interface between conscious and automatic or autonomous nervous function, which makes it, I suppose, on so many levels really potentially powerful for you. When you began waiting into breathwork, what was the first type that seemed to in part benefits to you? Do you remember what you tested?
James Nestor: I absolutely remember it. I remember it vividly because I still do it to this day. It’s called a Sudarshan Kriya. And I went down-
Tim Ferriss: How do you spell that?
James Nestor: S-U-D-A-R-S-H-A-N, K-R-Y-I-A.
Tim Ferriss: I never would’ve gotten that right. Okay, thank you.
James Nestor: It was through the Art of Living and you do this weekend workshop before they teach you the breathwork. And a lot of the practice in the workshop were not things I was vibing with at all. A lot of people were getting benefits from them, but it was making me extremely uncomfortable and I almost bailed. And then we did this-
Tim Ferriss: Wait, can you give us an example?
James Nestor: [inaudible 00:12:22]. You’re not supposed to talk about it. And I’m going to respect the secrecy of this. I can talk around it though.
Tim Ferriss: You can talk around it.
James Nestor: Have you ever sat in front of someone and a stranger and stared into their eyes for 10 minutes unblinking?
Tim Ferriss: No. That’s counter to my evolutionary impulses.
James Nestor: Got it.
Tim Ferriss: This is that kind of thing.
James Nestor: I’m just going to leave it right there and you can draw your own conclusion for the rest. But then some people were breaking down having these awesome experiences. I’m like, “Good for them, but this was just not my thing until I did the breath work.” And then I understood why they had you do all these other practices. And the breath work absolutely blew my socks off. it’s not that intense, but my body had such a reaction that I was wearing a shirt like this, and I sweated through everything. My socks were damp, there were sweat stains on my jean. My hair was sopping wet from just sitting in a corner of a very dark and cold room just breathing at this rhythm. And I said, “Oh my God, what is this stuff unleashing in me? What else is bottled up that I need to get out?” And I don’t want to sound too [inaudible 00:13:37], but it was the physiological reaction my body had to this. It was like a switch was just flipped on. And it made me very curious about breathing and other breathwork practices.
Tim Ferriss: And for those people who are interested, please correct me if I’m getting this wrong, but there are, I believe videos on YouTube that people can find of monks, if that’s a fair description, drying wet fabric on their baths using Tummo. And you can actually watch this in real time as it’s happening. I mean, there’s a lot out there that people can find. And also from a personal perspective, I mean years ago when I was first experimenting with the Wim Hof stuff and did some things in person with him, did some things in person also with David Blaine pretty shortly after, I think he broke, if I’m getting the term right, static apnea, sort of oxygen-assisted breath hold time as 17 minutes and something, it’s been crushed since somebody did 20-something minutes, which is just bananas. In any case, did a lot of experimentation with breath holds.
And at one point, if you were to ask me to hold my breath right now, I could probably do it for 30 to 45 seconds, which is not long. And I’ve historically had a lot of respiratory issues, particularly my left lung from being born premature, insufficient surfactant, had to be intubated on a respirator, et cetera. But when at one point, this was also in the Bay Area, I was, don’t replicate this folks, do this only with medical supervision, but I did a 10-day water-only fast, and I was nine days in very, very high ketone production, which is relevant for a bunch of reasons we won’t get into right now. It helps though with breath holds, I’ll just put it that way. Went into a hyperbaric chamber, which is a hard shell, so a very hard shell medical grade up to about 2.4 atmospheres of pressure.
Then did Wim Hof breathing and did a breath hold on an exhale and got to about nine minutes and then stopped because I was like, “I’m going to melt my brain.” I didn’t have the impulse to breathe, but I was like, “You know what? I’m going to call it complete at nine minutes.” It’s really wild what you can do with gaining familiarity with techniques around breath work. Now granted, I had a number of assists on that as well, but let’s pull back for a second and look at the book. So the book comes out, you have, I’m sure a million people coming to you for help, for various things. For you, what has evolved after the book came out? I am just so interested to know what has developed since the book was published for you, whether it’s additional insights, stories out of the woodwork that have seemed worth digging into, anything that comes to mind.
James Nestor: The book came out in the depths of lockdown, and so I had nothing else to do, just like most other people. So I just did podcasts all day long, three or four or five of them a day. So I was in this little bubble for about a year and a half. And then when it was finally time to come out and see the light, I’ve spoken at medical schools and banks and hedge funds and all that. And the reason I mention that is because every single time I’ve spoken, every single time afterwards, there’s a line of people and they’re all complaining about the same things, and they’re completely pissed off. They’re pissed off that they had to learn about this stuff in a book by a journalist and not from their doctor. And they’re angry. Their kid is super sick and didn’t have to be sick for the past three years.
They’re angry because they still have asthma, they’re still snoring and sleep apnea. So it was by engaging with these people and then engaging with a number of different researchers that I went on an additional learning journey, I’m still very interested in this stuff. I want to know the things that I should have included in the book, and I want to know how to answer questions better. So I pursued it. And I think one of the biggest things that I found, and I don’t know how interesting this can be to talk about, but I’ll throw it out there and then you can edit it out if you don’t want this out, is the amount of kids that have sleep disorder breathing, this can be snoring or sleep apnea or some sort of dysfunction in their breathing at night. And then if you take that population of kids who have these breathing problems at night, and if you take the population of kids who have ADHD, those two diagrams almost completely intersect.
And so what many researchers are saying is that ADHD does not exist. What you’re looking at are sleep-deprived kids. And the most shocking thing to me is that a kid that presents with ADHD, they’re never assessed for their breathing. They’re never assessed for their sleep. They’re given drugs and put on their way, and I think it’s criminal. And so this is something that really sort of ruffled my feathers, and it’s something that I try to talk about whenever I’m discussing this stuff because it’s vitally important. I think that we’ve been approaching ADHD as a neurological condition. I think it is mostly a breathing problem.
Tim Ferriss: Could you give people an idea? I suggest everybody get the book, by the way, I mean we’re going to talk about a lot of different aspects of breathing, but it doesn’t begin to approach what you’ve covered in your book. So everybody should check it out. Nonetheless, I want to make sure that people listening, for some of them, they’re going to be on the run. They’re going to be deeply interested in this particular Venn diagram, right? The ADHD or other types of neuro atypical conditions and breathing disorders.
And it makes me also think this is separate, although maybe my parents have ADHD, but they’ve gone through sleep assessments. They are Prescribed a CPAP machine, and there is exactly zero compliance. You will not wear those things. I tried to wear a CPAP machine and I was committed to wearing it, tore it off my face every single night that I tried to use it. And therefore, I’m wondering if somebody’s listening and they’ve never had, for instance, their child assessed, do you suggest them getting a particular type of assessment or is it more a matter of testing an intervention or a type of breathwork to see if there is any type of result? And is there any research also to support the overlapping Venn diagram? I know that’s a compound question.
James Nestor: There is an incredible amount of research to support this. I heard about this from researchers. I heard about it from doctors, from leaders in the field at esteemed institutions. They’ve been hollering about this for years. And exactly 0% of the population, either on the medical side or the general population has been listening to them. So the research is there, and you could type it up in any search engine and find these studies. It’s very, very easy to find them. As far as assessments for kids, yes, there are things that you can do in your house right now. What a lot of doctors, family, physicians will do if you say, “Hey, I want to check out my kid’s breathing.” They say, “Okay, we’re going to go to sleep lab and you’re going to do this,” and they’re not going to be able to sleep very well, so we’re going to give them sleeping pills, and that’s going to mess up the breathing.
And then they’re going to be diagnosed with sleep disorder breathing and given a CPAP and say, “Adios.” And if 50% of people given a CPAP within eight weeks won’t use them and the other large percent will use them, and it actually makes their breathing worse in many cases, so it’s not a good solution. So for those parents that want to assess their kid’s breathing and your own breathing, there are a number of ways to do it. Is your kid a mouth breather? In the daytime, is your kid breathing through the mouth often? It doesn’t have to be 50% of the time or 40% of the time, but enough for you to notice. And then when the kid is sleeping, wait for the kid to go to sleep, sneak into their room and listen to their breathing. If you can hear them breathing, they are struggling to breathe.
If they’re breathing through the mouth, they are struggling to breathe. If they are snoring or have sleep apnea, they are inhibiting their ability to grow physical growth. They’re causing neurological damage to their brains. They’re increasing their chances of having diabetes later on in life. And there’s this whole laundry list. And I’m not trying to be a scaremonger here. This is easy to look up, not controversial stuff. So I would start with that. There’s also an app. I have no affiliation with this app. I get no money from mentioning it.
It’s called SnoreLab. There’s also another one called SnoreClock, and they have free versions of this. And what it is you put it on your phone and you place it about four feet away from whatever sleeping head you want, and it records how you are breathing throughout the night with audio recording, and it creates a graph for you. And then it includes a score, a sleep score, and this is a very quick way of getting an initial signal if there is a problem. And then there’s a whole bunch of things to do after that. But I would start with those things.
Tim Ferriss: If they get a positive, what are some of the things that they can do? And for instance, I don’t know if this is one of them, maybe it’s not because maybe it’s not curative or incomplete, but a friend of mine, professional drummer, one of the top in his field, sent me a package of what he called hostage tape and it’s mouth tape, and he said it completely changed his life from a sleep perspective. Ultimately it looks like very, very, very, very expensive kinesio tape. But could you speak to what can be done particularly with kids, right? Because they’re not going to want some Bane mask, Darth Vader CPAP thing on top of their face, presumably, maybe some will comply, but what are some of the things that you can use or do in a case of a positive?
James Nestor: The number one thing you can do is become an obligate nasal breather. So it would be almost impossible to help to reduce these symptoms without doing that first. That includes starting in the daytime, creating a new habit around nasal breathing, and then you can allow that to sort of bleed into the night. Once you get comfortable enough with it in the day, you can then use these different tapes. You can use hostage tape if you, there’s a bunch of different tapes. You can go down to a drugstore and get any micropore tape, right? There’s 30 different kinds.
They all work. Find one that you think is best, and you use just a little piece of tape on your lips. A lot of people think this is a hostage situation, which is why hostage tape has that name, but all you need is a little piece of tape to close your mouth. A lot of parents are going to be apprehensive about doing this to their kids. So some entrepreneurial breeding people, Patrick McEwen, developed something called MyoTape. Again, no affiliation with this. I know Patrick, I’m a huge fan of this product because it goes around the mouth
And all it does is it gently trains a kid to keep their lips shut. They can open their mouth at any time. They can even talk wearing this. It’s just when they go unconscious and muscles relax. And I think that stuff is a complete game-changer. I have heard so many parents talking about their kids once you convert to nasal breathing, doesn’t work for everybody, but that as the first step so many people have told me their kids who are wetting their beds at age 10 and 11, stop wetting their beds. The symptoms of ADHD went away in two weeks. And this sounds like some sort of sketchy, crazy talk, but if you look at the science and how the body works, if you are not getting sleep, everything’s going to go haywire. And if you are, the systems are going to start to repair and heal. And that’s what’s happened with these kids. And I’m sure that’s what’s happened to your friend because he was a mouth breather at night his whole life, just like I was.
Tim Ferriss: Is there anything else that you did to address your own mouth-breathing or sleep quality?
James Nestor: Yeah, so once I sort of hopped on the breathwork wagon, I wrote it into various strange worlds, and one of those strange worlds was into the ENT, the ear, nose, and throat surgeon world. And it was while I was down at Stanford interviewing one of the leaders in the field, Dr. Nayak. I came across a breathing and sleep and respiratory therapist, and she specialized in people who had surgeries and all this, and she had this big roll of tape on her desk, and I asked her what that tape was, and she says, “I prescribe it to everybody.” And it was sleep tape. So I thought it sounded completely wacky.
I went home and looked up online what I could about it. Everything I found online seemed insane, and so I was apprehensive and I did something, and I don’t suggest anyone do, I just started wearing it immediately at night, and it sucked for about two weeks. It was terrible. Then I got over the hump and I’ve worn it almost every single night for the past seven years, and it’s really hard for me to sleep without. If I’m camping, I’m wearing it. If I’m sleeping on an airplane, I don’t wear it. I have seen people wearing it on airplanes on long flights, which is a whole other level of commitment. But only a handful of times have I not worn it and I immediately feel it and I can see it in my sleep scores. So it’s not something I’m making up.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Sometimes I wear my gag ball on international flights. It makes people really uncomfortable.
James Nestor: It’s cool if you do that thing where you put the blanket over your head, then I don’t care, right? But when they tuck the blanket into the collar and there’s this big piece of tape, it feels a little wrong.
Tim Ferriss: Just tears streaming down their face. All right, so the mouth tape, I’m going to give this another shot because I’ve frequently wondered what I can do that is also easy for travel to improve sleep quality. This has been the thorn in my side since I was very, very young. I’ve always had very, very challenged sleep quality. And I chip away at it here or there. I figured out a number of different things that are reasonably under my control, at least in a hotel room like temperature for instance. But I would love to segue perhaps from the mouth tape to the measurement of air quality that you’ve done, I guess, specifically CO₂ levels. Do you want to just take that and explain what it is that you documented?
James Nestor: This was something I had no idea about when I was writing the book and it’s something I got glued into about three and a half years ago. And so it’s the concept that we acknowledge that CO₂ is going up in the atmosphere. You can look at any graph, you can go out and measure it. Right now it’s 424 parts per million. But a lot of us aren’t considering what the air quality, specifically the amount of CO₂ is in indoor environments. We spend 90% of our time indoors and we’re not looking at the air quality. So I had heard from a researcher, he said, “You’re the breath guy. You should be checking this out.” I said, “Well, what do I do?” He said, “Why don’t you get a carbon dioxide monitor and take it around with you and just look at the air quality?”
And so, initially I was just like, “Well, who cares? Who cares if there’s more CO₂ or not?” Until I found all of these studies, and there’s about 30 to 40 years of studies and they’re done by governments around the world. So again, this is not sketchy stuff by some dude in a garage in Towson or something. These are real, which no disrespect, love that place. But this is real science, real data that anyone has access to. And what it turns out is when you get about triple the rate of CO₂ in an indoor environment, so starting at around 1,500 parts per million. Again outdoors, it’s around 425 parts per million. You start to find that in schools, certain cognitive test scores can go down about 50%, five, zero percent by tripling the amount of CO₂. And then you get up to 2,500 parts per million. You’re looking at headaches, chronic migraines, further decrease of test scores. And then it goes up from there all the way into serious cognitive disabilities up into 5,000 parts per million.
So that’s what you’re looking at. That’s the chart. And I’ve been carrying this thing around with me for about three and a half years, and I’ve been absolutely aghast by what I’ve found. I travel a lot. I travel around 100 days a year. And the average CO₂, when you are entering onto an airplane and suddenly everyone just starts falling asleep, they’re not tired. It’s because the CO₂ levels are around 2,500 parts per million, 2,500 parts per million. So if you wonder why you feel like crap after four-hour flight, I think it has a lot to do with the very low amount of oxygen and the very high amount of CO₂. And there have been all of these recommendations from engineering associations saying it should never be over 1,000 parts per million. That’s when it’s going to start to feel stuffy. I have not recorded one flight anywhere on Planet Earth where it hasn’t been over 1,000 parts per million, every single flight is.
Tim Ferriss: I’m sitting in a hotel right now and I am not sure. I think they’re trying to prevent suicides, I may not be able to open any windows. But are there any approaches that you can embrace to address this? If you travel a lot, what can you do?
James Nestor: Yeah, so I could tell you what I’ve done. I will tell you a little information about hotels. So I carry this thing around and I record every hotel I go into. And some are pretty good and some are extremely bad. And if you’ve noticed, and I’m sure you have, I just know you have. In the past 10 years, something very curious has happened. In every hotel, you used to be able to open the window, maybe not all the way because they don’t want to get sued if you commit suicide. But at least this much, six inches, seven inches, almost every hotel had that. Now they’re all glued up and they are glued up because heating and cooling accounts for 50% of the cost of maintenance. So what they do to save money-
Tim Ferriss: Good news, we have LEED Platinum. Bad news, your brain is dying when you stay here.
James Nestor: Yeah. So what they do, instead of pumping in fresh air and heating it and cooling it, which would cost them money, they recirculate the air from all the rooms. And you know this because you’re recording the CO₂ levels. And what I’ve found is in the hotels that have the big plaques outside that say LEED certified, Green certified that are the most expensive, have by far the worst quality air. I’ve recorded 2,800 parts per million waking up in one of these hotels.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. I was joking, but I nailed it.
James Nestor: No.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
James Nestor: Yeah, I know this is just a bummer parade coming from me. But this is something. Because once you see this and carry these things around, you’re like, “I am so screwed because I’m stuck in here and I can’t open a window.” And it starts to make you crazy. So my-
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
James Nestor: … solution for that is you have yourself or your assistant call ahead and ask a hotel, “Do you have windows?” “Well sir, of course we have windows.” “Can you open those windows just a little bit? Just a little bit?” And those are the hotels you stay at.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. What CO₂ monitor do you use or what’s a good option for folks if they want to embrace? I’m just thinking of how many people, we were talking about Venn diagrams earlier. In my psyche Venn diagram, there’s a OCD and hypochondria.
James Nestor: I know dude.
Tim Ferriss: But you know it’s over. And then in the bullseye is CO₂ levels in hotels.
James Nestor: And listen, I know those hypochondriacs that everywhere you go, they’re assessing everything. Some of them are my lovely friends, I love them, but they drive me fricking crazy. I never want to be that, but this is a real, real thing.
Tim Ferriss: This is a real thing. Yeah.
James Nestor: It’s something that you should pay attention to. So I bought about 10 different CO₂ monitors and assess them against a professional device. And most of the crap you see on Amazon is worthless. Don’t bother with it. There is one brand, again, I get no money. I wish I did. Maybe I should endorse these products, but it’s called an Aranet4, Aranet4, A-R-A-N-E-T-4. That’s the best one. You know what? I probably even have it in my pack right now, I could show you, but it’s the most accurate one. And the battery life lasts forever, last about three to four months. And once you start doing it, it’s hard to stop.
And I got so fired up about this that we’re now creating, we’re working on right now, creating the database. I’m trying to arm about 100 people with these things. And then everything will automatically upload to this database. So you could see what hotels have good air quality, what restaurants have good air quality. Because governments, let me tell you, governments are going to do nothing about this. It’s when companies start getting outed for recirculating all of this breath backwash from all of these people in the hotel that they’re going to start paying attention.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. How safe is it to assume that if you’re in a major city like LA, Chicago, New York, that you’re getting better quality air if you open the window in the hotel? Is that pretty much always a safe assumption? Where do you get to a point where you’re like, I’m better drinking in this backwash in the hotel than opening the windows?
James Nestor: That’s a really, really good point. Maybe Shanghai in summer, maybe Mumbai in spring. I have not assessed that. I think that’s a good point. If you are in a hotel that’s very high up and the CO₂ level is just absolutely pedal to the metal, 3,000 parts per million, my assumption would be that opening that window you would have, there’s more benefits than harm from that. Again, I think there’s a lot of variables, but the CO₂, if you’re talking immediate acute harm versus chronic harm, the acute harm from CO₂. Your ability to rebound after a long flight, not feel hung over, not feel jet lag, not feel drowsy. I think that’s a big one.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if this is true, people can do their own due diligence. I wish I knew the answer offhand, but I know that ketones, exogenous ketones for instance, I mean, there are many different types of ketones, salts ketone, monoesters, diesters, etc. But have been developed to protect divers, specifically military divers from oxygen toxicity. But I wonder if it increases CO₂ tolerance. I wonder if that might have a place in the travel kit. I’ll let people do their own research on that. But what else is in your travel kit, given how much you travel, whether it’s related to breath or not, is there anything that is non-obvious like the CO₂ monitor that you can speak to?
James Nestor: Right when I was ripping on hypochondriacs and people obsessed with it. We really want to go there?
Tim Ferriss: [inaudible 00:39:27] a gallon of Purell.
James Nestor: Gallon of Purell. You know, I didn’t use to be-
Tim Ferriss: In three ounce packets.
James Nestor: I didn’t used to be-
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly.
James Nestor: I didn’t use to be one of those people until I just got completely drained after doing too many tours and they got older. And now I’m kind of one of those people-ish. I have a couple of night lights that are red lights and I’m very typical. Everyone’s just nodding, tell me something new. And those are the only light source that I have in hotels and especially important after a long flight. So I have this CO₂ monitor. If there’s a window, I will absolutely open that. I’ll try to take a cold shower before bed, especially if I am very jet-lagged. As far as the other tech, I carry a lot of vitamin D, K2, vitamin E in case I feel something coming on. I have some other supplements I carry round as well. And without getting too weird here, I have this very small electric device, a frequency device that I am currently assessing it’s validity.
Anecdotally, I could say it’s been a complete game changer for me. And what I usually do at night is I plug into that thing and I really feel a difference. I know about six other people that have these, and so we’re starting to sniff around at collecting some real data about it. So that’s the main thing in that little zip pocket that you have in suitcases, this stuff just stays in there. It’s more important than a toothbrush. You can get a toothbrush anywhere. You can’t get a frequency device anywhere, and you can’t get a red nightlight anywhere. So I just keep this in there and I carry it with me wherever I go.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So a couple of clarifying questions since all of my listeners are denizens of Weirdville. So the red light, is that just looks like a children’s nightlight that plugs into an outlet next to the sink, or are we talking something more substantial so that you can actually operate and walk around your room?
James Nestor: I have two that are able to fade up and fade down in the bathroom. You usually don’t need anything. I can keep the door open at night and I also will often carry a light bulb, a small, not a big one because those are pain. But I have these little light bulbs. One of the most important things I didn’t mention is the sleep tape thing. And if I don’t bring that or if I’ve forgotten it, I’m the guy at 12:30 AM looking for a liquor store that had some sort of packing tape or something. It’s that critical to me. But for the red lights, they have little bulbs and also these nightlights are bright enough. At night, I try not to be too productive, especially if I’m tired, I want to sit, maybe I’ll listen to something, but I want the light to be very low. And I think that there’s plenty of good research on that, not disturbing your circadian rhythm. So we won’t need to get into that.
Tim Ferriss: How do you pack a light bulb without it shattering? And now I’m just envisioning a normal old light bulb. I imagine there’s a little more to it, but how do you pack that?
James Nestor: These are these small LED ones. So the bulb is actually plastic. It’s plastic. I would love to find an incandescent one because now I’ve been hearing about flickering and I’m starting to notice that a bit because I’m going clinically insane, and you’ve just outed me unfortunately. So any of you inventors out there, it’s now incandescence, don’t have to charge $400 if they find one in your house. Need to invent a small little red incandescent bulb and I’ll buy a dozen of them. So there you go.
Tim Ferriss: All right. This stim device, that’s too tantalizing, Scooby snap. What does this look like? Because I am very much, very deep down the rabbit hole of all things kind of biomedical. Not to say this is medical, talk to your professional. And entertainment and informational use only. But what is this thing? And where do you apply it, how do you administer it?
James Nestor: I’m in about a six-year journey into this world that’s led me down, I would say the vast majority of the past that’s led me down that have been complete BS. There’s so much stuff if you look up online, that is just absolute garbage. If they haven’t even tested this stuff on biological matter, on cells at least, don’t buy it. Who cares what their claims are? So that’s the most important thing if you’re starting to look at electric medicine. But it is a real thing. PEMFs which were considered quackery 30 years ago are now becoming a staple of many offices.
Tim Ferriss: What are PEMFs?
James Nestor: I’m sorry. That’s pulse electromagnetic fields, these devices that you can plug into, they’re amazing for pain. But it turns out that the history of these devices is much deeper than that. It goes back to the ’50s and ’60s, and Russia was doing a ton of research into this. So to answer your question, this is a somewhat Russian device. It’s about this big. I won’t say it’s officially Russian, it’s more Soviet than Russian, to be honest. You’ll get what I mean if you-
Tim Ferriss: [inaudible 00:45:06] on it.
James Nestor: The aesthetics of this thing are so like Atari 2600 that it is just so, I just really dated myself with that one. Anyway, so it’s about this big and it has all of [inaudible 00:45:17].
Tim Ferriss: This big, so it’s like 10 inches or so for those people who can’t see.
James Nestor: Okay, I’m sorry.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s okay.
James Nestor: I’m taking my hands too close to the… So it’s like when you catch a fish, right? You put it right up to the camera.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I was just going to say.
James Nestor: Okay. You want specifics. It’s about five inches wide by about four inches tall, and it’s about an inch and a half thick. And it has about 40 preset programs on it. And programs for grounding when you’re not able to ground, programs for Schumann waves, programs for cardiovascular health, programs for respiratory health. And I will be damned if this thing hasn’t really fixed a lot of issues. And again, this is 100%-
Tim Ferriss: What kind of stuff?
James Nestor: … anecdotal.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, anecdotal’s okay.
James Nestor: You name it. You start getting into this.
Tim Ferriss: Unpaid bills. I have a PMF device for you.
James Nestor: It’s just you manifest money, everybody. You plug this thing in and you can’t keep it out of the doors and windows. It just starts coming in.
Tim Ferriss: Another reason to have your hotel window open.
James Nestor: There are many reasons. That’s one of them. But it sends out, we’re really going to get into this. It sends out certain frequencies that have been studied, that have been found to reduce the loads of viruses, and bacteria, and fungi, and more. And I know what a lot of you’re thinking, this is completely based on zero. But I’m here to tell you, there’s a lot of legit research. And if I was going to place my money on anything, this is where things are going to go. We have exhausted chemicals, we’ve reached chemical overload, and chemicals are fantastic. They’re great. They can do so much. But there’s this whole other layer to health and I really feel like this is where stuff is moving.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re on the same page there. I mean, I recently interviewed a scientist by the name of Dr. Kevin Tracy, who’s I would argue the most cited, most credible or certainly one of the most credible. He’s incredibly well-published, researchers looking at legitimate vagus nerve stimulation. And then you have researchers at Tufts like Professor Levin and others who are doing incredible things ranging from looking at salamanders and axolotls, I want to say, for regeneration and how electricity can be used in cancer applications. I’m very much looking at this incredibly closely as it sounds like you are. For people who want to specifically, was it PMF or PEMF?
James Nestor: P-E-M-F.
Tim Ferriss: P-M-F.
James Nestor: P-E-M-F devices.
Tim Ferriss: For people who wanted to learn more about this, what should they search online if they wanted to read up on what it is, the type of thing that you’re using?
James Nestor: They should read my new book coming out next year.
Tim Ferriss: I see.
James Nestor: No, no, no, no, no. This is actually not in my new book. So what I would do is 100% don’t go on Amazon and look up these devices. Some of them can’t. I keep saying, don’t go on Amazon. Have you heard that three or four times? Because I certainly have. Amazon’s great just not for certain things. And this is not one of the things you want to go on it for. Because the problem is some of these devices can put out the specific frequency that has been studied to be beneficial, but they’re not putting it out at the load, at the power it needs to be. So they’re paying lip service to the science without actually going deep and providing the therapeutic effect. So some of these devices are very expensive, up to 20, 30 grand.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, okay. That is expensive.
James Nestor: But those are the ones used in clinics. These are the ones used for people with severe chronic pain issues for everyday devices. There are some cheaper ones. I don’t want to endorse anything. I don’t want to name them by name because I’m not done studying how legit they are. But once you start digging in a little deeper, you start to see that in Eastern Europe, these things have been used continuously for 60, 70 years and maybe they’re all crazy and are suckers for a placebo effect or maybe these things work. And so that’s where I have started sniffing around. And this thing I got that I’ve convinced a few other people to get. We’ve seen just some extraordinary stuff that doesn’t make any sense. And so I’m just trying to parse how much of that is a placebo-ish effect and how much of it can be measured and repeated in animal models.
Tim Ferriss: If somebody just wanted to read up on the research or learn a bit more about this without selecting a device necessarily, where would you suggest they start?
James Nestor: I would say read The Body Electric by Robert O. Becker, doctor who basically paved the way for Michael Levin at Tufts. And if any of this sounds crazy, all you have to do is read any of Michael Levin’s papers. You’re like, “Oh my God.”
Tim Ferriss: Your head will explode. Yeah.
James Nestor: With electricity and specifically frequency, you can grow two heads on a salamander. You can regrow another leg where it’s not supposed to be. You can grow with the frequency of eyeballs and eyeball on an animal’s back. So it just shows you that there’s a lot more to the story than chemicals. And if you can do that to a salamander and to a frog, then obviously we’re going to be affected by these frequencies as well.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Thank you for that. Now, you also glossed over other supplements. I recognized D, K2, E. What’s in your et cetera, other supplement bucket?
James Nestor: Oh boy. Again, I never thought I’d be one of those guys carrying around the granny vitamin packs, all the supplements.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’ve got two of them 10 feet from me. And can I tell you, just to endorse the granny pill packs. I thought those looked so ridiculous. Added more labor. So I would carry around basically a pharmacy of bottles with me. And then when I started using the granny packs, I was like, “Why did I not start doing this 30 years ago? It saves so much time on a daily basis.” So just to give you permission to use the granny packs.
James Nestor: Yeah, I’ve got the granny XLs going on and those are also in the suitcase. So everyone talks about supplements, but if you want to go there, we can go. I’ve got all the typical stuff. I wish I had some cutting edge new thing you’ve never heard of, but all of you will be yawning in unison if I told you. There’s a little CoQ10 in there, there’s a little nattokinase, there’s… It’s the old classics that are in there. Nothing cutting edge.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it. So the nattokinase that’s going to have the K2 in it, presumably, right? Is that the source?
James Nestor: It will. But I have the special pack in case I get sick, in case I get COVID on the road, I have a special pack. Because if you’re taking heroic doses of D, then you need to be taking E, and A, and extra K2 with that. So very important. So that’s why I have that in its own separate little container, the sort of emergency pack.
Tim Ferriss: And if anyone out there is thinking, I’m looking for the next way to prove that I’m really tough. Well, forget about doing breath work in freezing cold water. If you’ve never had natto from Japan, then just eat a bowl of that dish and that’ll be the new tough man TikTok challenge for people who have never tried it.
James Nestor: Speaking of that, I was like, “Screw this. I don’t need supplements, man. I just need to eat better.” And then you start to do the research and realize that no vegetables contain the minerals that they used to. It’s virtually impossible to get all these things the way our ancestors did. And natto was one of those things. I went down to a Japanese market and I said, “I’m not taking these pills, man. I’m going to start my morning.” How many… Japan’s awesome. That place is perfect. There’s no crime. It’s beautiful. I said, “I’m going to start my day every day with this.” Wow. Day two. No way. It’s the stringiness that will really get you.
Tim Ferriss: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So people can try that out if they haven’t tried it, that’ll be some podcast challenge. So I appreciate you indulging me on all those questions since I pay attention to my travel kit, I do. And I’ve got all sorts of electronic devices all over the place. It’s kind of absurd. I literally have an extra suitcase for all my blood flow restriction stuff. I did just have elbow surgery. So granted, I have kind of an excuse my e-stim for lymphatic drainage. I’ve got so much crap with me right now.
But on that note, I guess this is a bit of an awkward sequitur, I suppose. But my surgery came from a sports injury. So I’m thinking about athletes, and there were a few things in some of my prep materials here that I wanted to touch on because I hadn’t seen them before. So for athletes and professional athletes, so on, we see nasal breathing during training, breath hold sprints, which I first was exposed to way back in the day with Laird Hamilton at his house. One of the kings of big wave surfing. Surfing Giants, I think Riding Giants is the documentary. One of the two, people should watch it, it’s insane. Especially for people who don’t know the name, Laird, if you’ve ever seen tow-in surfing, Laird helped develop and popularize that. Stand up paddle boarding, he kind of resurrected it and helped make it popular, just a beast of an athlete. And so I remember seeing him on an assault bike, one of those bikes where you’re also pushing with your arms where he would do long exhale breath holds and push basically until he would pass out off the bike. I’m not suggesting anyone do that, but there were a number of other BOLTs, I won’t go through them all, but could you speak to BOLT score tracking, all caps, B-O-L-T, presumably an acronym. I’d never come across this. And anything else that you’d want to add?
James Nestor: Yeah, if there’s one population that has actually paid attention and started to get much more serious about looking and focusing on their breathing, it’s athletes. Athletes aren’t as scared of a little inconvenience or a little discomfort. This is what they thrive in to get ahead of everyone.
As a big wave surfer, you have to focus on breath work. You have to focus on your breath hold. If you don’t, you die. Which is one of the reasons why Laird is 60 years old, looks like he’s 30, that the guy is just constantly focusing on his breath because he wants to stay active in the field at the top of his class.
So, surfers have known this for a very long time, but a lot of runners and rowers and baseball players and football players and soccer players haven’t been clued into this. And so the elite trainers that I know, they said this is the number one thing that they do for athletes right now is to focus on their breath.
And what they’ve found is the vast majority of athletes, you would think that they would have their breath completely focused, that they would be the best breathers in the world, but they absolutely are not. They’re as dysfunctional as everyone else. They’ve learned how to push through the pain to win the game, but that doesn’t mean they’re breathing properly.
So, the first thing they do is retrain their breathing. And what they find with almost all these athletes is the majority of them are not engaging their diaphragm. There’s this muscle organ that sits beneath the lungs and when you breathe in, the diaphragm goes down and when you breathe out, it relaxes and comes back up.
What they’ve found is most athletes are just breathing into the chest, very limited diaphragmatic movement. And if you do that, it’s a complete waste of energy and it’s not efficient. The reason is you are just able to take little bits of breath each time, so that requires you to breathe so much more and it jacks your heart rate.
If you were able to breathe 10 times a minute or 20 times a minute instead of 40 times or 60 times or a hundred times a minute, then your heart rate will go down, which means your tolerance for whatever thing that you’re doing will go up and your recovery time goes down. So, it’s a basic math here, but so many people aren’t clued into it.
And once they start focusing on the breath and adopting these better habits, I mean, these trainers are just making monsters out of these people. Their performance goes through the roof, recovery times go down. It makes a huge difference. But still, I can count on one hand how many joggers I see out running in the morning that are breathing in and out of their nose. And that’s the number one thing at lower zones to be breathing in and out of your nose and just no one’s doing it.
Tim Ferriss: And is BOLT, is this BOLT score tracking a shorthand simple way of tracking breathing efficiency or what is that?
James Nestor: Okay, sorry, I didn’t answer that question. It is the body oxygen level test. It used to be called the blood oxygen level test, but Patrick McKeown changed that because he got some flack from some pulmonologist. What this is is-
Tim Ferriss: Oh.
James Nestor: … you take… We’re all going to do it. I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to show you like a good writer, that’s what they do. So we’re going to relax your shoulders a little bit. We’re going to relax the space between our eyes, relax your tongue.
You’re going to be breathing in and out of your nose, and you’re going to take an inhale in just real calm and out. And we’re going to do this two more times. Inhaling and out, inhaling and out. Let that breath naturally come out, hold your breath, hold your nostrils, hold your nostrils.
So on that exhale, you’re holding your breath in your nostrils and you’re going to hold your breath until you feel the first urge to breathe. This is not a competition. So, if your diaphragm quivers, if you swallow, if that urge to breathe is palpable and you are aware of it, you stop and you calculate how much time has passed.
Tim Ferriss: That’s it?
James Nestor: That’s it and-
Tim Ferriss: So, it’s three normal breaths or are they deeper than normal?
James Nestor: No, and this is where people try to cheat because they’re athletes and they’re competing, try to get ahead, normal breaths. And then on the exhale, this is not a Laird Hamilton, this is down to neutral, hold your breath, down to neutral, hold your breath, and then you start the timer.
And what you’re going to find is the more you focus on your breath, the more you learn how to take fewer, deeper, slower breaths, which oxygenate your body so much more efficiently, which lower your heart rate, which also increase your heart rate variability, all of these other benefits, you’re going to watch that BOLT score go up and up and up and up. Usually after about maybe a week or two, you could see it double and then after that, you could see it triple-
Tim Ferriss: Oh wow, that’s fast.
James Nestor: … triple. It depends who you are. I don’t want to make blanket comments for everyone. And it also depends how honest you are with yourself. Some people are like…
Tim Ferriss: Gaming the system.
James Nestor: Yeah, if you’re gaming, and if no one’s looking, why would you want to game the system? Be honest with yourself. When you feel that need to breathe, just stop. And you’re also going to notice it changes throughout the day.
So, if you’re very tired, if you’re coming off of a long flight, if you’re stressed out, your BOLT score is going to suck. If you’re very well rested and you’re in a good zone, your BOLT score is going to be three times what it was before. So, there’s a lot of variability.
Tim Ferriss: Then I’m reading here AI overview. So caveat, but a higher score indicates better carbon dioxide tolerance and efficient breathing, which you can improve with breathing exercises over time. Is there anything else from the world of sports that you’ve seen that has been particularly impressive or surprising besides the fact that most athletes, just like normal civilians, are suboptimal in their breathing?
James Nestor: I think the other important thing, and this really goes hand in hand with what I was just talking about, is proper breathing biomechanics. A lot of people have lost the ability to breathe properly, and that includes athletes. So, what you can do is you can train, learn how much you can expand your rib cage down here, learn what a really a full, deep, enriching breath feels like, learn how that changes your posture and then start adopting and adapting your body to these biomechanics when you are practicing whatever sport.
And there are bunch of trainers that do this now. If you look at LeBron now waiting in between plays, what’s he doing? Most of the time, he’s doing breath work and he’s doing it properly. He’s doing alternate nostril breathing.
You look at his diaphragmatic movement, because you can see his chest and his abdominal area. So, this makes a huge difference. This is biology, it’s not psychology, and I think athletes can benefit the most from it.
Tim Ferriss: So two questions, and these may be dead end, so I apologize if they are, but two questions related to the diaphragm and also inspiratory muscle training. So resistance at the mouth for building, well, effectively training the muscles involved with respiration. So, the first question around the diaphragm is, and I’m not sure if you’ve dug into this, I guess pun intended, but is any type of soft tissue treatment or manual therapy sometimes helpful for people to get better at diaphragmic breathing? That’s number one.
Then number two, do you have any thoughts on the various training devices that can be used for developing actual muscle strength or endurance for the respiratory muscles?
James Nestor: Yeah, so the first part of that, absolutely, find a good physio or find a good masseuse and who knows what they’re doing and to loosen up this area because for a lot of people it’s frozen. And what’s really sad is for a lot of older people, when the bones and the muscles start to atrophy a bit, things get brittle and you just lose all flexibility, so to find someone that can loosen up the rib cage around here.
You can do it yourself. There’s a bunch of different exercises you can do to help facilitate that process, but it’s better having someone who really knows how to do it help to open that up. And then you can start playing with your breath and after an hour of this, you can feel what a difference it makes, everything just starts to open up.
And now we’re talking about those different devices that the air resistance, the breath resistance devices, they work great. So, there’s a bunch of different brands, they all basically do the same thing. And what they do is they just create extra pressure to allow you to develop that better muscle memory.
It’s like putting a donut on a baseball bat. That’s probably very aged way of saying it too, but that’s what we used to call them. So you swing that bat around a few times, it feels very heavy, and then when you take it off, it feels so much lighter, and it’s so much easier to use it. So, that’s essentially what these devices are doing.
And it doesn’t matter if it’s a mask, it doesn’t matter if it’s one of those inspiratory muscle trainers, which is just one of the things that you put in your mouth. It almost looks like the end of a snorkel without the tube.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly.
James Nestor: They all work. They all work.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s see. I recall also just a warning for some folks. So if you use one of these inspiratory muscle trainers, I recall I had Bas Rutten, this legendary mixed martial artist on the podcast, and he has such a device that he’s co-developed and used constantly and his numbers are mind-numbing when you see them.
But if you do these exercises with a rounded back, so you’re “breathing through the back,” the amount of back soreness that you will feel if you have not done this before, which will last awhile, is you will feel like you’ve just done six hours of deadlifts. I mean, it is shocking how sore you’ll be. So, I just want to tell people start with a lower dose than you think you can handle when you’re getting used to this stuff.
James Nestor: I think that that’s good advice for every single thing we’ve talked about. People hear stuff, they want to go out and kick its ass immediately. This is especially true for the sleep tape. What you should do is you should be wearing it for 10 minutes answering emails one day and the next day wear it for 20 minutes answering emails, and then the next day wear it for an hour. You see where I’m going with this?
After two weeks of acclimating your body and getting yourself used to this, then try it when you’re taking a nap for 15 minutes and then eventually work into using it at night. And this is very true for these different devices. This is not a plant, by the way. I have this little desk here and this is on it.
So, this is a device. It doesn’t need to have a ton of pressure to be beneficial. This just has slight pressure to it. And when I’m working on something-
Tim Ferriss: So, it looks like an adult pacifier basically of sorts.
James Nestor: Yeah. It’s in other words, extremely sexy, something you want to be bringing on that airplane along with your sleep tape and your blanket, just a heads up. But it’s a little thing that you put in your mouth that has just a little bit of resistance. Because what I notice is when I get extremely focused when I’m writing something, my breathing patterns go to hell. And this is very common. It’s called email apnea.
It’s so common. Like the NIH spent 20 years researching it and blood pressure goes up, you get headaches and it can cause some chronic issues later on because you are holding your breath when you get scared or you focus, you’re having this reaction. If I use a little device like this, you can even put a straw in your mouth if you want something simpler.
It just reminds your body to keep with that rhythm. And if you have to work for four straight hours because you have to crank something out, you need every bit of focus and energy that you can get. And so that’s when those very intense times, I use this thing and it works like a [inaudible 01:10:02]
Tim Ferriss: What is that called?
James Nestor: Oh, boy.
Tim Ferriss: [inaudible 01:10:04]
James Nestor: Okay. Again, I am not endorsing this by any way. People give me things. This one’s by my friend Anders Olsen, who was in the book, he’s been studying breathing for 20 years. I love this thing. It’s called the Relaxator.
Tim Ferriss: I love the name.
James Nestor: This really feels like a commercial now. It’s called the Relaxator.
Tim Ferriss: [inaudible 01:10:25] for 30% off.
James Nestor: You can buy two and get one for free. Yeah, I’ve really screwed myself not getting a percentage of these things, but this thing is cool because these other devices that you see are big.
Tim Ferriss: Big, yeah. That, you could stick in your shirt pocket.
James Nestor: Like bondage-level big, a lot of bondage themes going on in this podcast. But this thing literally, you can wear around your neck, you stick it in your pocket. It doesn’t look so weird. And I love this thing, and this is one of the things I keep in the suitcase.
Tim Ferriss: So, if you’re jamming and working on something, writing for four hours, do you just have that? Do you just take a few breaths with that every hour? What does the use look like?
James Nestor: No, I have it in my mouth.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, the whole time.
James Nestor: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m glad I asked for clarification. Okay, I got it. Oh, wow.
James Nestor: I should have provided you the whole time. I won’t say every single minute, but…
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so you’re breathing in through your mouth and out through your nose in that case.
James Nestor: I’m mixing it up a little bit. I know I talked about all the wonderful things to do with nasal breathing. This simulates them in some ways, but what it does is it creates extra pressure, a little extra pressure to force you to slow down. So if you are going to be mouth breathing, mouth breathe with a device in that causes that extra pressure.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Yeah, I found it.
James Nestor: So, sometimes I breathe through my nose and I breathe out through this, so it just extends that exhalation. So, the exhalation is twice as long as the inhalation, and that will put your body into that parasympathetic state.
Tim Ferriss: The Relaxator Breathing Retrainer, yeah. So, I’m looking up Anders Olsen, all those goods, presumably Scandinavian.
James Nestor: Yeah, he’s as Swedish as you could be, yes.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Conscious Breathing Institute AB. All right, excellent. I’ll need to grab one of these before everyone in my audience buys an adult breathing pacifier.
James Nestor: Do they?
Tim Ferriss: Amazing.
James Nestor: It’s a beautiful world we’re going to create out there, everybody. You’re all going to be looking good.
Tim Ferriss: [inaudible 01:12:49] It’ll be like fight club. People can wink and have the secret handshake when they see other people with the bright green adult pacifier, so-
James Nestor: You just look the other direction and pretend you don’t know them, which is what I prefer to do.
Tim Ferriss: So, you mentioned writing. We’re going to take a little breather, pun intended, on the breath talk. I want to talk about writing for a little bit because I’m hoping you can help me sort out this 800 page draft of a book that I’ve got on my hands. But let’s begin with something that folks may not be familiar with. The San Francisco Writers Grotto, what the hell is the San Francisco Writers Grotto? And how did you become involved with it?
James Nestor: Oh my God, that was a long time ago. It was a group of professional writers that real professional writers when there were things called magazines around that you could actually write for magazines and make a semi living out of that. And they wrote books and [inaudible 01:13:45] Bronson was one of them, Julia Shears, Caroline Paul. And it was a group of writers who didn’t want to write at home anymore.
They wanted to write in little offices and be able to have lunches where they could complain about their agents. And this was a very sought after place, and I was able to get in there and I absolutely love it. And I made so many good friends there who are still my friends. And then it got a bit diluted.
One thing about writers is, especially later on towards the 2010s, when the magazine industry was going through a bunch of issues, they didn’t have consistent income, so they noticed that people would just stop paying rent. So, then they had to get some other “writers” in there, basically, people who had very large amounts of money, who wanted to tell everyone at parties that they were writers, they paid rent, man.
And that’s what happened to that place. But some wonderful people there. I learned so much being in that community, and sometimes I really miss it.
Tim Ferriss: What did you learn there before the trustafarians got roped in to raise the average rent price? What are some of the lessons that you learned? I mean, because part of one of the major challenges that I have as a writer is that I’ve spent so much of my time in self-imposed solitary confinement. I’m just like, I’m just over it.
And sometimes the solution can be going to a cafe and working at a cafe, and that’s an improvement. But is there anything that you really took from that experience in terms of lessons learned, habits developed, anything like that?
James Nestor: So many lessons. What these people taught me was the business part of it. And I know that that probably isn’t something people want to hear about, but I had prized myself as a very precious artist that I only wanted to do certain things in a certain way, and it had to be, and all of that’s bullshit. It’s completely not sustainable.
So, they taught me that this was a real job that you had to approach with a business mind, which I thought at the time was clouding it over or it wasn’t as pure as I would like it to be, but it was a very quick heads up. So, they introduced me to how to find an agent and how to talk to an agent, and how to deal with your publisher when your publisher was being difficult. And so really pragmatic skills and how to navigate the publishing world, which as you know, can be extremely, extremely tricky. And those lessons I’ve taken with me, and I think it’s allowed me to actually make a living doing what I’m doing by applying some of those lessons to the books I write.
Tim Ferriss: I was reading, you sent to me some of these snippets on writing, and I want to read part of it. This is quoting you, “So, I think the concept of writer’s block is a convenient out for people who want an excuse to not work and complain or get attention by talking about writer’s block. Every professional writer I know that writes for a living, that is writing is the only source of income for these people,” I think that’s actually really important parenthetical, “has never experienced writer’s block.”
And I’ll just add my comment, or maybe they just kind of got over it when they were put in an environment like the [inaudible 01:17:23]. “Every hobbyist who introduces him or herself as a “writer” at dinner parties has chronic writer’s block.” I have heard something similar from every friend of mine, here’s a distinction though, who has written for newspapers or magazines.
I do know some professional writers who focus and have focused exclusively on books who still talk about writer’s block. Do you think that is just a function of in the trenches, regular deadlines where you don’t have the luxury perhaps of long lead time for a book? Could you maybe just speak to this writer’s block term and excuse perhaps?
James Nestor: I have a feeling I’m going to get myself in a lot of trouble here, but I can just tell you from my own experience, the answer is yes. I think that anyone that needs to write to keep the lights on or support yourself or your family. And if you don’t hand the thing in, you’re not going to get paid and you’re going to be in a very precarious situation, finds a way out, and that doesn’t, you can meditate or you can sit and say, “I’m not leaving this chair for the next four hours until I produce the thing I need to produce.”
So, I think a lot of that comes down to your attitude and your financial situation. I have never had writer’s block because I came from a place where I cut the cord in the corporate world and I had to do this to pay my mortgage. It was the only way I was going to survive.
And there were so many times I wasn’t in the mood. I wasn’t inspired. The muse wasn’t there. Who cares? Sit down and write the thing and get it done. And so this preciousness around writing, and this is one thing I learned a lot at the writers grotto, maybe one of the negative things is people just love to talk about it. Like when someone’s on a fast and they just want to tell you all about their cleanse or their fast, and it’s the last thing anyone wants to hear about. People just want to talk about writers block all the time because I think it’s a convenient way for them not to do the thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there are a lot of topics that fit in that category. It’s like if someone’s taking 10 minutes to tell you about their dreams, you’re like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, all right.”
James Nestor: That’s exactly right, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Or in any case, we keep giving examples, but I want to try to focus here. When you cut the corporate umbilical cord, was that at a point where you were already replacing your income or was it a leap of faith on some level? And in either case, how did you make the decision to go 100% into writing? At what point did you make that decision?
James Nestor: I was a well respected member of corporate America for a very, very long time, and I was making a living and bought me a house, all that stuff. And there was obviously something missing in that. And so what I would do on nights and weekends is I would write magazine articles, and I absolutely loved it because it allowed me an excuse to knock on doors that I wouldn’t ordinarily knock on and talk to weirdos.
So, I unfortunately started off by just writing stories I wanted to write because I didn’t need to do it. The money wasn’t that good anyway. It was just writing things I wanted to write. And I got so absolutely absorbed in these worlds and would take months writing these stories. And I thought it was impossible for me to do this full time.
And that’s what I did for 6, 7, 8 years until I got to a point where I had several different magazine contracts, and I was at a four-year review for my work performance, and my boss was like, “Oh, really good.” And this is exciting and we’re really-
Tim Ferriss: What were you doing at the time in corporate America?
James Nestor: God, yeah. I was the head of an editorial department, so I was doing a lot of editing and a lot of writing for a organization, which shall remain unnamed at this time. And it was a very easy job that I had. The pay was good, all that stuff.
And I remember sitting in this guy’s office and looking at him and looking at the office, and I had the most sickening feeling at the bottom of my stomach. And I did not plan to do this, but it’s like it came from another realm in mid-sentence as he’s talking about this, I just said, “You know what? I quit. I can’t do this anymore.”
Tim Ferriss: It’s just a visceral, like animal response.
James Nestor: Yeah, it was. And it’s almost like I heard myself saying this and he was shocked, and I was like, “I’m going to go out and just kick ass.” And this was around 2009. Guess what happened next? Everything imploded and I lost all of my contracts, and I had a couple of extremely difficult years trying to find my way, navigate my way through this.
But I said, “I can’t go back until I really give this a go.” So, I could tell you so many horror stories. Year after everything went wrong, everything book contracts got canceled, magazine stories got canned, and it was horrible, but I kept with it.
Tim Ferriss: What kept you going? I mean, was it that the control Z wasn’t available and you couldn’t go back to a corporate gig? Or was there some other internal monologue or mantra or any type of time bound commitment that kept you going with the writing?
James Nestor: I could have gone back to a corporate gig for sure. At any time, I could have gone back. But I found another lifestyle and another feeling and another calling that felt almost illegal from my upbringing. I was doing everything I was told not to do. And there was an aspect of that and a danger to that that I liked. I was also, I didn’t cut the cord when I was 22, right? I cut the cord when I was later. I said, if I don’t do this now, if I don’t do it now, I’m never ever, ever going to do it. It’s going to be so hard to do it now, but if I wait any longer, it’s never going to happen and I’m never going to be happy. So that’s what drove me.
Tim Ferriss: When did it click? When did you, after the canceled contracts and the disasters, and just train wreck after train wreck, was there a moment, it doesn’t have to be a financial moment, but was there a moment where you’re like, ooh, okay, this is starting to build some momentum, or this is giving me the spider sense, which is somewhat the opposite of the quick blurting out of I quit in the corporate meeting, which is like, oh, here we go. Something is here. Was there a particular moment where things started to click into gear?
James Nestor: There was a moment. I was sent by Outside Magazine to write about the World Freediving Championships in Greece. And I remember being out there and sitting on the prow of this boat and watching these people do this thing that is not supposed to be biologically possible, swimming down on a single breath of air to 350 feet for four minutes at a time, coming back. And it sent chills through me. It still does when I think about it.
And I remember writing my editor Alex Heard at Outside, and I said, “There’s something bigger than the story going on here.” And he’s like, “Okay, but you got to finish the story.” So no writer’s block there. It’s weird how that happens. So I delivered the story within a couple of weeks. The story made a splash. I got a book deal out of it. And was finally able to have some semblance of comfort, and that’s when the lever turned on pretty big for me.
It’s also when things got really serious, right? Because you’re dealing with a larger sum of money, you’re dealing with something I’ve never done, which was write a book. Written a ton of articles, but writing a book was a different thing. But I loved the challenge. And I just went 100% in seven days a week, just like I was so absorbed in it, and I was so happy. I was very tired and I should have paced myself better. But every day I was so grateful not to be in an office and so happy to be doing something that was able to really stir my curiosity and my fascination with the world.
Tim Ferriss: When did writing become self-sustaining financially?
James Nestor: It became pretty self-sustaining from that contract. It was a larger contract. But then, I won’t give you the whole dirty story, but the book came out, and I got quite a large advance. And the book didn’t sell as much as the publisher had hoped. And they basically put me-
Tim Ferriss: This is deep.
James Nestor: Yes, yes. So within two weeks, they give you two weeks to make a splash. And it didn’t make the splash that they wanted to make, so they just cut it out. They just sort of stopped promoting it in any way. My editor at the time wouldn’t call me back. And I was so heartbroken by, not just the financial part of that, but the fact that these people that I really had these close relationships after a few years just sort of left me out there right when I really needed them. But I licked my wounds and focused a little more and got back to writing. And just learned a lot of valuable lessons in that process of exactly what not to do and what I should do more of. And the next book was Breath.
Tim Ferriss: What were the things not to do? Were these business dimensions, or were they other things?
James Nestor: It was trusting people in the industry to do things that they are paid to do, but at the time not realizing that you are very low on their priority list. And so specifically with promotion, begging people to send your book to a magazine, begging them to get you an interview and having them say, “This isn’t my job.” So again, it comes down to my business naivete. Had I done it again, if I were to go back and do it again, I would’ve done it, I would’ve hired an agency to take care of PR and not relied on the publisher. All these things that I’m sure you already know.
Tim Ferriss: I also had to learn a lot of these things.
James Nestor: But you have to learn that you’re not just a precious writer writing precious books, and you get to sit in a corner and tell everyone you’re an introvert. You have to take this whole machine by the reins and do it all. That includes hiring people to do things that you shouldn’t have to hire people to do, but that’s the reality. So the longer I’ve stayed in that industry, the more I’ve sort of been able to feel out those areas of deficiencies in publicity or whatever and fill them in.
Tim Ferriss: So I want to read something. This is, to give credit where credit’s due, it’s leadersmag.com, this is from 2022. So this might take a second because it’s a chunky paragraph, but I’m going to read this because I’m hoping for some advice. But we can do that, I think, autobiographically with your experience. So here we go.
“I think of my wife who had to watch me rewrite this book over and over, then watch my deadline slip away by months, then a year. I was bringing in no paychecks during this process, writing this book was a 24/7 job for several years. So now fourth time rewriting, being two years later on delivery of the book. She definitely got nervous When I went to the Paris Catacombs on research and traveled to talk with all these dentists. She kept asking me, ‘This is a book on breathing, right?’” This is like a lot of my friends who are proofreaders of my current 800 page draft. Back to the quote. “I told her, yes, and that it would all make sense in the end. The truth is I had no idea how I was ever going to put the pieces of this puzzle together.”
All right. So I find myself in maybe a similar place. How did you find yourself out of the catacombs and into an actual coherent book?
James Nestor: I worked.
Tim Ferriss: I know you worked.
James Nestor: I would love to say-
Tim Ferriss: How the hell-
James Nestor: I would love to say it’s more complicated than that. I worked until it was done. And some of these projects, as you well know, some of them kind of feel like they slide off. Things find their place, they find their footing. You’re almost out of control of the process. The process takes you over and takes you long for a ride. And it’s a wonderful feeling like, if only every project. And some of these, you cannot find your way out. You cannot see day light for a very, very long time.
And that was this book. So many people were so nervous. I think about my mental state, my physical state, because, hey, I’m talking to dentists. They’re like, “Cool. Why aren’t you talking to a pulmonologist.” I said, “Because dentists know about breathing more than pulmonologists.” And I’m doing all of this crazy stuff that has nothing to do with breathing. And I would call my agent and tell her this. And she kind of trusted me, but also was just like, “We have to hand in this book.” I said, “Okay.” And it was at that time it was 290,000 words, and I had to bake it down to 85,000.
Tim Ferriss: Wait, say that one more time.
James Nestor: It was 290,000 words.
Tim Ferriss: That makes me feel better.
James Nestor: That had to come down to 85,000. The key is where I was gaining real clarity is I did something completely cliched is I got a house in the woods where there was absolutely nothing around. No Starbucks to go to, no store to go to. And I just did that thing. I thought, huh, if I have no distractions around, what will happen? And it turns out that boredom is the most wonderful muse of all. And I was renting the house, and all these problems with it, it was I don’t care. I’m renting it. I’m just here to work.
And it was through the process of thinking about it night and day, just becoming completely absorbed in every thread of the story. It all started, I started to see the matrix after a while and it came together. And as you know, you know when it’s getting there. Once things start locking in, and then you know exactly what your job is. But sometimes that process can take a few months, or even a year for all of those pieces, those Tetris pieces, to find their way to start to make sense.
Tim Ferriss: What were, if you remember, some of the breakthrough moments or key decisions that allowed you to go from the 290,000 words to the 85,000 words. Because you’d have to cut a lot, right? There may have been some very new structural decisions that you would have to make about the overall architecture of the book. What were some of the key moments or decisions that allowed you to ultimately do that?
James Nestor: The key moments were being comfortable enough with the story and being so uncomfortable with how I had told the story that I was able to ask for help from my agent who’s a master editor, veteran in this world, and from my editor at the publisher. I gave them just this complete dog crap. And I said, “The information here I think is really compelling, but there’s no story. There’s nothing to hold onto.” And it was through their-
Tim Ferriss: As our through line, you mean?
James Nestor: Yeah. Not only the main through line, but all these sub threads that sort of need to weave together around that through line. So it feels like you’re reading a book and not a Wikipedia entry of anyone can get information anywhere. What they’re coming to you for for a book is they need to be absorbed in it. I mean, as a journalist, people don’t like to hear this, but you’re in the entertainment industry. If people stop reading your stuff, you have failed. So you have to keep them reading. And you want to include information that’s going to help enrich their lives too. And you do that through stories.
So it was through their intervention and advice that they were able to see something I was not able to see. And once we had that skeleton, and I remember the day it all came together, I was sketching it out, and I said, oh my God, this is finally it. Then fleshing out that skeleton was just almost mechanical work because I already knew the story. And I knew exactly where to-
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you had the blueprint, and then you could-
James Nestor: I had the blueprint.
Tim Ferriss: … lay the bricks.
James Nestor: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What did the skeleton look like? I know this is very getting into the weeds.
James Nestor: Yeah. So I did this experiment at Stanford, which for 10 days I plugged my nose. So I was a mouth breather for 10 days. And then for 10 days, I was a nasal breather. And we took all these different blood work, we did pulmonary function tests, we did testing three times a day to see how our heart rates were changing, to see CO2 levels, every imaginable thing that we could possibly do. And in my imagination, this was going to be three paragraphs towards the end of the book because I was like, it’s cool, and the results are confirmed everything I had been told, right? And I was able to feel them personally. And it just confirmed across the board everything about the dangers of mouth breathing and benefits of nasal breathing.
So that two paragraph section is my editor and agent, they said, “No, that’s your through line. Tell the first three quarters of this book through those 20 days, and have all of the other stories branching out through that 20…” I said, “But it’s 20 days. I’ve been working on this fricking thing for five years.” They said, “Nope, that’s what it’s going to be.” And so I quickly put it together after a couple of weeks, and I went, wow, that’s it. And we finally had it. And I remember that feeling too of just extreme relief more than anything, but there’s always a way out. I know you’re in the weeds right now, I can sense that you’re just like, what the hell? I can’t figure this. There is always a way out and you’ll find it.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Yeah, your starting point of almost 300,000 words makes me feel a lot better because I think that’s roughly, I might be slightly over that. But yeah, it’s a big, big old honking block of granite that I need to start chipping away on.
I mean, we’ve covered a lot here, I want to touch on perhaps one other piece that I’ve also explored personally, which is now in modern terms, worked with a woman named Leah Lagos, this is quite a few years ago now, but to use particular patterns and cadence of breathing to affect heart rate variability, to improve heart rate variability. And it would seem that using very particular cadences of breathing is not a new thing. And I was hoping maybe you could speak to prayer cross-culturally and breathing practices, and what you’ve observed or found in the literature.
James Nestor: Everything I’ve mentioned today about how to improve breathing through biomechanics, through different breath work patterns, all of this stuff is literally thousands of years old. So we have instruments now to measure how they affect us, but back then they were able to see this in real time by these people practicing these different methods.
So there were some research being done around 22, 23 years ago in Italy where they were looking at different prayers, specifically the Buddhist mantra, om mani padme hum and sa ta na ma, which is a Kundalini chant and the Catholic prayer cycle of the rosary. And they noticed that all of these different prayers required people to exhale at around five to six seconds. And when you’re speaking a prayer, you are exhaling. And then there was this pause where you take this about five to six second inhale, very slowly.
And they looked at what happened to the bodies of all of these subjects and they looked at how heart rate variability went through the roof, how blood pressure decreased, how oxygen increased in the brain, and all of these different systems of the body entered the state of coherence. And they called this breathing pattern coherent breathing after that. You don’t need to pray to breathe this way. All you have to do is inhale five to six seconds and exhale five to six seconds. And if you don’t believe me, if you’re able to track your heart rate variability live, if you have a HeartMath monitor or whatever, you can see this play out in real time within a few seconds of breathing this way. And what you’re seeing and what you’re feeling is your body working at the state it’s designed to work at, at the state of coherence, at the state of peak efficiency.
Tim Ferriss: James, we’ve talked about a lot. I’m tempted to ask you about the new book, but I don’t know if you can divulge anything about it. But if we’re focusing on the breath side of things, is there anything else that you would like to mention? Whether it’s about technique, the book itself, plans for the book, anything at all outside of that too that we haven’t covered?
James Nestor: I think that the main thing, and this is my, I won’t call it my issue with the breath work culture that’s out there, but it’s just something I want to bring awareness to, breath work’s a huge deal right now. There’s retreats, there’s different schools, there’s classes all over the place. There’s breath work fashion, there’s breath work jewels, there’s all that stuff.
But what I think that that culture is doing is a bit of a disservice to everybody else in that it’s complicating and creating a barrier around something that already belongs to everybody. This is what my book was mostly about. It wasn’t breath work. It was about this biological function of breathing. And if you look at 90% of people on the planet right now suffer from some form of breathing dysfunction. The most helpful thing you can do for yourself is just to be a normal breather. You don’t have to go sign up for breath work class. And the breath work classes that I’ve gone to have been amazing. They’re incredible. And then I watch people walk away mouth breathing, or complain about their snoring or sleep apnea. So it’s like going to a culinary school, and just learning how to make desserts and not learning how to make entrees and not learning how to make food that is nutritious for you.
I’m not saying breath works bad. I love it. I try to do it as often as I can. But you have to understand the foundations and the fundamental part of that. And the fundamental part is very basic. It’s very simple, it’s very natural, which is why I think it gets overlooked. People think it’s just too simple to be effective until you do it and until you look at the science. So that would be the one suggestion I would have for people. Before you go into hardcore breath work, get your breathing to a normal place and see the benefits from that.
Tim Ferriss: Sage, sage words. Yeah, I mean it’s true of so many types of workshops, right? People are working on A, B, and C and then they walk out doing the exact opposite. Just get to normal natural breathing. Question related to sleep, because I have to make this, of course, self-interested, as we start to land the plane. But I have been having this last week, for reasons I won’t bore you with, but I’ve been having a hell of a time with sleep. A lot of it’s due to the environment. But besides tape on the mouth, and the things we already talked about, is there anything else that you recommend to people for sleep position, head position, anything at all, doesn’t have to be what I just mentioned. For purposes of improving or regulating sleep?
James Nestor: If you have, I’m sure you have various devices that measure your sleep quality. If you have a device that is able to look at dips in oxygen, then that’s even better. I’d wear as many of those devices as you can. And then I would start experimenting with different little things that you can do around… I would start with assessing your SnoreLab or SnoreClock. They both do the exact same thing. I’d put the phone on the side of your bed and I would record it not for one day, but for a week. And I would start with that to see if you are mouth breathing, to see if you are snoring, to see if you are holding your breath. And then from there, I would slowly adopt nasal breathing through the methods that I mentioned. Start in the daytime, start extremely slowly, and you can try to get MyoTape as well. They make it for adults as well as kids. It’s much more.
Tim Ferriss: M-Y-O-
James Nestor: M-Y-O-T-A-P-E. Again, I have heard so many people, big fans of that. If you have your breathing locked in, you’re not snoring, okay, you’re not mouth breathing, then I would start to look at positions. So what they used to do back in the day is get a t-shirt, and tape a sock or a ping pong ball or something light to the back of that t-shirt. Because so often when you are lying on your back, breathing is more difficult. This is what happened with COVID patients, which is why they started proning them. They started putting them on their stomachs and sides and they were saving so many more people this way.
Tim Ferriss: I didn’t know that.
James Nestor: So the same thing is true with breathing at night when you are on your back, most of the expansion in the lungs when you breathe happens in the back. It’s not the front, it’s the back. So you could be inhibiting that. So try side sleeping and by placing that ping pong ball or sock, taping it on the back of a t-shirt, when you’re unconscious, it will be so uncomfortable that you will go from side to side as you continue to record your sleep with SnoreLab and with all of your wearables.
After that, you can try incline bed therapy, which is where you raise the head of the bed around six inches. That can help a lot of people. And then there’s several other things you can do after that. But I would start there. And for most people, not everybody, for most people, they will see a reduction and sometimes a complete snoring to be completely resolved. And for some people with sleep apnea, they will see significant reductions.
Granted, I will say that sometimes troubled sleep is caused by stress. When you’re waking up and your mind is just racing. Sometimes it’s not so much a physiological thing, sometimes it’s psychological. But if I were you, I would want to get the physiological stuff out of the way first. Check all of those boxes, make sure your breathing is consistent and normal and fluid at night, and then you can dive deeper into it.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing. Thank you. James Nestor, everybody. Breath, the New Science of a Lost Art. Highly recommended. Man, do my friends just… I recall, and still to this day, just the barrages of texts that I get about it, and how within grasp these approaches are for people. Like you said, you don’t have to sign up for a $5,000 breath work seminar. These are very much within reach at low cost or no cost. Where can people find you online? Is there a best place for people to find James Nestor if they want to dive deeper, see what you’re up to?
James Nestor: Yeah. I took a year off of all social media and everything. I just felt like I needed to reboot. I’m crawling back into the morass right now. So I’m on Instagram. Some jerk took James Nestor. So I’m under M-R, James Nestor, Mr. James Nestor. That’s also my website. A lot of the stuff we’re going to be giving out different breathing protocols, different breath work audio tracks, and all that stuff. So if you go to the website, you can sign up and get all these freebies that way.
Tim Ferriss: Beautiful. And we will link to everything in the show notes for folks listening and watching as usual. So all the resources, all the gadgets and adult pacifiers and so on that we mentioned will be at tim.blog/podcast. You can just search Nestor on that page, N-E-S-T-O-R, and you’ll find everything. And to everybody out there, be just a bit kinder than is necessary as always to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in. Until next time.
