 You can be tracking your sleep, you can be taking your melatonin, you can be having your blackout shades, whatever. But if your breathing is dysfunctional, if you're snoring or having sleep apnea, your sleep is wrecked. I don't care what you do. And this is an equation that has even been left out of the larger conversation about the quality of sleep. Everyone's focused on NREM, they're focused on deep sleep, but they seem less focused on breathing quality. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Well, certainly the first thing for everybody is the big three, right? So we diet, exercise, which everybody talks about, but sleep is often overlooked. And there was a lot in the book about breathing and how it's snoring and all these respiratory issues are impacting our sleep and how that affects our daily lives. And I certainly know how much better I operate on a full night sleep, let alone in my youth when I was just barreling through life. I think it's important to acknowledge that if you aren't sleeping well, you're never going to be well. I'm lucky enough to know Matthew Walker. I don't know if you know his book, Why We Sleep, an incredible book. But and he agreed with me on this is that you can be tracking your sleep, you can be taking your melatonin, you can be having your blackout shade, whatever. But if your breathing is dysfunctional, if you're snoring or having sleep apnea, your sleep is wrecked. I don't care what you do. And this is an equation that has even been left out of the larger conversation about the quality of sleep. Everyone's focused on NRM, they're focused on deep sleep, but they seem less focused on breathing quality during sleep. And as I learned firsthand in the Stanford experiment, just the pathway through which you breathe air can make a significant difference to the quality of your sleep. I don't hear anybody talking about this. They're starting to, except for some dentists, some people in sleep medicine. But but even people in if you're diagnosed with sleep apnea, people give you a CPAP and they're like, cool, see you later. And that's it. But they're not looking at, do you suffer from chronic obstruction? Do you have chronic sinusitis? Is there a structural issue in your nose? Are you a mouth breather at night? I just haven't heard that too much of those issues being in the in the larger conversation about sleep quality. Well, I think for many, that's when they will first recognize that they may even have an issue with their breathing. So we talked about this, we're breathing unconsciously, thankfully, we're not having to focus on our breath to survive. And because of that, we'll go most of our lives not even realizing if we're a nose breather or a mouth breather, no one's really pointing it out. In my case, I realized it when my ex-girlfriend was like, you snore like crazy. And I thought, okay, well, I got to do what anyone else has to do, lose some weight and the snoring didn't go away. And it wasn't until I started taping my mouth shut that what do you know, breathing through my nose, the snoring went away. But so many of us realize, okay, I have a problem with snoring, but it's just for my partner to deal with. I'm going to take the melatonin anyway. So I'm just going to wear the sleep tracker and make sure I get enough REM sleep. That's going to solve all of this. But let's talk about how breath really impacts our sleep and where this nose versus mouth breathing is impacting us. And then we can get into all the other areas of a life that it's playing an impact in as well. Because I think many in our audience have at some point recognized breathing and sleep, they're linked, and I may be having some issues here. Well, I think a lot of people only start to recognize that there is an issue once they're diagnosed with a serious issue. But as we've known for decades and decades, even mild snoring, even mild sleep apnea, even something milder than those two things called upper airway resistance syndrome can have a downstream effect on your mind, on your body, on your metabolic health, on your hypertension. I mean, on and on and on. And again, these are things that have been studied for decades. There's nothing controversial about it, but a lot of people aren't thinking about it and they haven't been told about it. So with that little summary, the biggest thing you have to realize when you're sleeping or when you're exercising or even when you're in front of your computer is that pathway through which air goes in directly affects you in so many ways. So when you're breathing air through the nose, you're forcing it through this maze of different structures, right? If you were to cut my head in half and I've seen my head cut in half and in an x-ray, you see this enormous area of sinuses here. It's kind of beautiful because it looks like a seashell, right? If you cut a seashell in half. And animals that live in seashells, they use their shells for one thing, to protect themselves, to filter out all the gunk. And that's exactly what our noses do. This is our first line of defense. And as they're filtering stuff out and conditioning air, they're also slowing it down and they're pressurizing it. So if you're breathing through your nose at a slow rate, it's almost impossible to make this sound. You can do it if you really try, but it's really, really hard. Whereas if you breathe through your mouth, there's zero resistance. I just took two liters of air, right into my lungs. Zero resistance that goes instantly in. And this is how hard it is to choke on myself. It's very easy. So this isn't a huge leap of logic to get to this, right? It seems so basic that slower air, filtered air, pressurized air is going to be better for your airway. It's going to allow your airway to stay more open, less vibration to happen there. Also what happens when you're breathing through your nose is right now, if you open your mouth, your tongue is going to naturally rock back just a little bit into your throat when you open your mouth. When you close your mouth, the tongue naturally goes up to your palate, which helps open up your airway. Guess what happens when you do that at night? Your airway tends to be more open. So again, I want to say very clearly that just breathing through your nose is not going to fix everyone of every problem of snoring and sleep apnea, but it can only help. And for some people, like you, and this is one thing I've heard more from people than anything else, thousands and thousands of people are saying, I've been breathing through my nose at night and I seriously have no snoring now. I don't have even mild to moderate sleep. I don't have it. Why hasn't someone told me this 30 years ago? I have no answer to that. I don't know. I don't know why. Yeah, it's certainly scary with all of the downstream health impacts that mouth breathing has on our physiology that we're not more concentrated on what would appear a simple piece of surgical tape to be a very impactful solution in our lives. You mentioned something in there that I think many in our audience and I was even surprised to learn breathing has an impact in and that's our metabolism and metabolic function. Can you talk a little bit about that and how breathing actually impacts our metabolism? So for every little molecule of glucose that we use that we burn to create energy, we use about six molecules of oxygen. So far more oxygen is needed in this process to create ATP, to create energy. So when we don't have that oxygen readily available, our bodies, our cells will actually start running anaerobically. So without oxygen, we can still get energy this way, but it is extremely inefficient. And it can be toxic after a while if we run anaerobically for too long. So again, this is not controversial. It's not theoretical. We've known this for more than 100 years. So when people aren't breathing in a way that is efficient for their bodies, especially when working out, sometimes you're going to unnecessarily put too much of your body in that anaerobic zone, which is fine for a little while, but very damaging if you stay in it for too long. That's just one element. So that's how it works on a cellular level. But you also want to think about breathing as something that it's something you're doing all day long. So if you are slightly struggling to do something you do all day long for every single day, your body can stay alive, but it can never stay healthy. So it's always playing catch up throughout the day. And this is something that professional athletes, I don't know why it's taken them so long to figure this out, but they're just discovering and I know a bunch of trainers who are saying, this is the first thing we have athletes do is to fix their breathing and it can have massive effects to performance and recovery because of course it does. This is how you're getting most of your energy. So if you use it in an efficient way, you're going to be able to go harder for longer and you'll be able to go faster than your competitors. Well, what's interesting then following that through is like, okay, well, shouldn't I just be breathing more frequently because I need more oxygen? So why am I not just accelerating my breath? Why should I be slowing my breath? Why is the pace so important? Well, if someone had that argument with food that I want more energy, so I'm just going to be eating all day long because I need more energy. I think that we would all see the holes in that argument. It's not as easy to see the holes in the argument of breathing until you hook yourself up to a bunch of different machines and you see how your body operates when you over breathe. Mostly what happens, this is the simplified version of this, we will exhale too much carbon dioxide and when we do that, we cause constriction in our blood vessels and you can do this, everyone at home right now listening, don't do this while driving, please. Walking, if you're walking on soft grass or sand, if you take like 30 huge breaths, you're going to feel some dizziness in your head. You might feel some tingling in your fingers and maybe your extremities will get colder. That is not from an increase of oxygen to these areas but a decrease of circulation. That's what happens when you over breathe. Not only that, but you are unnecessarily using all of this energy to be breathing air in and out that you are not using. When you breathe in the shallow way very quickly, you're just taking air into your mouth, your throat, the upper part of your chest here into the bronchi but more than half that air doesn't even make it to the lungs. You're just bringing it in to exhale it. It's almost like cruising around in a car and just revving the motor in neutral every time you're at a stop sign. You might sound cool to people around you if you've got one of those big mufflers on there but otherwise you're going to be creating all this undue wear and tear on the engine and using more fuel. That's what happens when you breathe too much.