Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
James Nestor · 2020
Journalist James Nestor spends a decade and a Stanford self-experiment proving that *how* you breathe matters as much as what you eat or how you move, and that most of us are doing it wrong. The fix is refreshingly simple: breathe through your nose, exhale fully, and slow down.
Bestselling, vivid exploration of how nasal and slow breathing improve health, with actionable techniques.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Breath pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Breathe through your nose, day and night. The nose filters, warms, humidifies, and pressurizes air, and releases nitric oxide that boosts oxygen uptake. In Nestor's Stanford experiment, just 10 days of forced mouth-breathing spiked his blood pressure, crashed his heart-rate variability, and triggered snoring and sleep apnea, all of which reversed once he switched back to the nose.
- Aim for about 5.5 breaths per minute: roughly a 5.5-second inhale and a 5.5-second exhale. This 'resonant' or 'coherent' rate syncs your heart, lungs, and nervous system, lowers blood pressure, and shifts you into a calm, parasympathetic state.
The other 5 — and the full 9-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 9 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Worst Breathers in the Animal Kingdom
- The Stanford Experiment: Mouth vs. Nose
- Nose: Your Built-In Air Conditioner
- Exhale: Empty the Tank
- Slow: The 5.5 Rule
- Less: Breathe Light, Build CO2 Tolerance
- Chew: Reshape Your Airway
- More & Hold: Strong Breathing as a Tool
- The Lost Art, Reclaimed
Finish Breath tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 9 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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