 All you have to do is look around. And in my case, you look in the mirror, you could see. So there's the anatomical change, right? And if you don't believe that, that our faces have changed in the past 200 years, look at any pre-industrial school. They all have perfectly straight teeth. With perfectly straight teeth, you have a wide jaw and a wide face. With a wide jaw and a wide face, you have a larger sinus cavity and a larger airway. Simple geometry. This seems impossible until you actually do the research. And I did the research, and I looked at hundreds of these skulls, and they're all smiling back at you with perfectly straight teeth. And you say, my God, what has happened to us? 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, what I would love to unpack for our audience was you'd mentioned this earlier around evolution, and even modern life, we're now losing out in longevity. So there's some interesting linking between lung capacity and longevity and our breathing health. So can you discuss the science around that? So our lungs are like our gas tank, right? And if you're making a cross-country trip, would you want to be filling up every time your gas tank got down to about, you know, halfway down? Or would you want to use that entire tank of gas? That would be a much more efficient way. You can think of the lungs that way, where if you have smaller lungs, you're forcing yourself to breathe more. And when you're breathing more than you need to be breathing, you can have problems with your blood pressure. You can also, as I mentioned before, be using up all of this energy you could be using for other things. And you're also creating a stress state in your body. You're sending your brain signals that you are very stressed. And so you don't want to be doing that. So there's a ton of research looking into lung size, because if you have larger lungs, that means you're able to breathe less and get more oxygen in with each inhale, which means you're able to run so much more efficiently. And the sad thing is that the trick that God has played on us all is once we get to about 30 to 35, we start losing lung capacity. And after 50, this starts happening precipitously. It really drops off. And with those smaller lungs, you have to breathe more, which is why you see older people, it's so sad, just breathing through their mouth. I mean, what's that doing to their bodies? They need all the energy they can get. They need all the time to rest and restore that they can possibly get. And yet they're just stressing themselves out. So we've known this that lung size correlates directly to lifespan, so much so that some researchers even looked at people who got lung transplants. And they found that patients who were transplanted with larger lungs lived way longer than those transplanted with normal size or smaller lungs. So most of us don't need lung transplants to get larger lungs. All we have to do is breathe correctly and stretch. This is what yoga is. This is what yoga began as before, it was vinyasa flow and all that stuff, which is a hundred years old. Yoga was a technology of sitting in one spot and breathing very deeply and focusing on your breath and keeping these intercostals in your rib cage very flexible so that you could breathe these big, deep, enriching breaths effortlessly. Let's unpack that a little further. So the way that we're breathing is influencing our lung capacity? Absolutely. If you're not engaging the lower lobes of your lungs, if you're just breathing into your chest, which is so common nowadays, your lungs and the elasticity in those lungs and the surrounding areas will become atrophy, right? And Dr. Belisa Vranich calls this the corset. And this even happens with people who, gym rats who are just in there trying to get the most killer abs. What they're doing is they're creating this muscular corset that actually inhibits healthy breathing. So it's of paramount importance for everyone, whether you're a gym rat or whether you're an old person or a young person or an office jockey or whatever, to remain flexible in the rib cage. I think more than any other place in your body, you want to be able to breathe in effortlessly. If you're struggling to breathe, then you're just wearing your body out. And with COVID, we've heard a lot about inflammation and its impact on our body. And many of the symptoms are the inflammation that COVID is causing. And we think about cancer and so many other maladies, the human body. Breathing is actually linked to inflammation as well. Breathing is not only linked to inflammation, it's also linked to the onset of severe symptoms of COVID. There was a study that came out last week that said people with sleep disorder breathing are much more apt to be suffering from severe symptoms of COVID. Of course they are. People with COPD, people with lung problems, people with inflammatory issues, larger underlying issues, these are the people who are most susceptible to the most severe symptoms of COVID. So it goes both ways. It's not only COVID, but so many other chronic issues. If you're not engaging your lungs in an efficient way, then you're stressing your body out. If you're stressing your body out, you are stimulating inflammation throughout your body. What is the main thing tying the vast majority of modern chronic diseases? Okay, we have heart disease, we have diabetes, we have hypertension. What is the main thing? It is chronic low-grade inflammation, inflammation that just sticks around, okay? Breathing is a wonderful way and I believe it's the most efficient way of immediately reversing that inflammation, okay? You still need to eat good food, everybody. You should still exercise, yes, but you have to be breathing correctly while you're doing those things. Dr. Andrew Huberman down at Stanford has been studying this the last couple of years. He believes the most effective way to take care of stress and the inflammatory response that comes with stress is to take two inhales on top of one another and to let it out slowly and then return to a very slow and rhythmic breathing pattern. You can feel what happens when you do that and you can also see what happens if you're wearing wearables or if you're tied up to a bunch of different instruments as I was in these laboratories. Anytime that I'm stressed, have anxiety, nervous, depressed, it's apparent always in breathing first and that's how I usually catch myself that I realize that there is something wrong and then I have a few moments of focusing on 10 breaths and feeling so much better afterwards. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna 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. Yeah, how you feel, your mood affects how you breathe and how you breathe affects your mood and how you feel. So these things work back and forth. I heard this one thing from a researcher. I thought it was fascinating. They said that 80% of the messages between the brain and the body are coming from the body to the brain. We usually think that the brain's the control center, just the brain needs inputs to respond to. So to think that the vast majority of messages are coming from the body. So if you're sitting hunched over in front of your desk and you're breathing really fast, you're breathing through your mouth all the time, you're sending your brain signals that there's a problem, there's an emergency, your brain responds by flooding the body with hormones and adrenaline and cortisol to keep you inflamed and people spend their whole day and their whole night in this state. And a lot of people believe that this is the major underlying problem behind the vast majority, not all of them, but the vast majority of these modern chronic diseases is this low grade stress, this low grade inflammation. Now that we've spent the first half hour terrifying the audience around. You're crossing the hell out of everybody. Take that, happy holidays everybody, there you go. Merry Christmas. See you later. Yeah, bye-bye. What can we start to do practically and what have you found has been some of the better ways for those who are just now becoming aware of the impact of breathing to incorporate this on their life and see that massive change? Well, I wish this were something that was very complicated and magical, but it's not, it's just completely simple and anyone can do it. As I've mentioned in the book, I can tell you how to breathe in about 4.5 seconds, but if you don't know why you should breathe this way or what it's doing to your body or where this stuff comes from, it just doesn't stick. So that's what I tried to focus on in the book, but we'll stick with a how and we can get down into the why as deep as you guys wanna go, but the how is, first of all, and we've covered a little bit of this, that the very first thing that people need to do is to become aware of their breathing. And again, not very glamorous, not very fun, but you need to become aware of your breathing at night. You need to become aware of your breathing when you're stressed out, when you're working in front of a computer, especially when you're exercising, even when you're happy, become aware of your breathing because you're gonna notice something if you're like the vast majority of people on the planet, you're gonna notice how dysfunctional your breathing is. About 80% of office workers suffer from something called email apnea. What this is is you open up your email in the morning, and you're like, oh my God, if all these stupid emails, I gotta get back. And you stop breathing because that's a fear response, right? That we have way back in our evolution, and then you breathe way too much. And then you stop breathing again. And all you have to do to see this is wear a pulse oximeter or another wearable, and you can watch what happens to your breathing when you sit down and do some stressful office work. So by becoming aware of your breathing, you can notice this. And once you become aware of it, you can fix it with some very, very simple tweaks. But again, it's not very fun or interesting awareness. It seems so simple, but that is the most powerful tool at night and in the day. Again, with the email thing that you had brought up, I mean, it leads me to think about how many folks have addictive behavior to technology, doom-scrolling, just looking for the next adrenaline buzz that they can get from their technology. And certainly that's gotta play a role. I mean, the idea of stopping that breath and anticipating the next refresh and everything else that is going on has to be playing a role here and actively shortening our breath as we're getting older. Yeah, so when I mentioned in the book right at the beginning that humans are the worst breathers in the animal kingdom, actually the modern humans are the worst breathers that have any life form ever on the planet. People are like, how do you know that? That's impossible. All you have to do is look around. And in my case, you look in the mirror, you could see, so there's the anatomical change, right? And if you don't believe that, that our faces have changed in the past 200 years, look at any pre-industrial skull. They all have perfectly straight teeth. With perfectly straight teeth, you have a wide jaw and a wide face. With a wide jaw and a wide face, you have a larger sinus cavity and a larger airway. Simple geometry. This seems impossible until you actually do the research. And I did the research and I looked at hundreds of these skulls and they're all smiling back at you with perfectly straight teeth. And you say, my God, what has happened to us? Anyway, I realized this is the positive part of the program, so we'll leave that negativity behind. But if, so you have the anatomical issue, you have the environmental issue, there's pollution, there's allergens, there's dust, there's mold in the air. It plugs people up, they can breathe. They have problems breathing, right? And then there's other stuff, which is modern day problems, which is posture. I can't tell you how many times I've been in an airport or on public transportation or actually anywhere at a cafe. You watch people looking at their phones, even if they wanted to breathe a healthy enriching. Actually, I'll backtrack. Even if they wanted to breathe a normal breath, they could not do it because of the way in which they're holding their bodies and their necks. So also when you hold your body this way, you put all of this strain on the back of your neck, which can cause lower back pain, which is something 80% of the population always. So you start putting the pieces together and you're like, it's not one thing, it's a perfect storm of all of these things that have come together that have made us the worst breathers. So once you acknowledge the core issue, you can say, okay, cool, how do we fix it? So I realized that's what this portion of the podcast is about. Awareness is the first thing. Posture is the second thing. By posture, I'm talking about oral posture as well. Shut your mouth. You have to be a nasal breather. If you're a mouth breather, you're never ever gonna be healthy. Some people need surgery. A lot of people don't. They just need to train themselves to breathe through their noses. You will never be healthy unless you're an obligate nasal breather.