Why Being a "Mouth-Breather" Is Bad For You w/James Nestor | Joe Rogan

What made you want to write this? Like, where did this come from? There's actually two things. About 10 years ago, 11 years ago, I had this really weird experience. I was in San Francisco with a lot of breath work, yoga stuff going on there. And I kept getting pneumonia. I surf a lot at Ocean Beach, and I thought that that was the reason. So I kept getting bronchitis, pneumonia year after year. It just kept happening. So a doctor friend of mine suggested a breathing class might help. I didn't know much about this, but went down, signed up, and was sitting in the corner of this studio, cold room, legs crossed, breathing in this rhythmic pattern. Nothing crazy, just, and then really slow. And I sweated through my t-shirt, through my socks. My hair was sopping wet, sweat all over my face. So I went back to her. I said, what happened? Like, you're a doctor. You should know this. And she said, oh, you must have had a fever, or the room must have been too hot. So she had no idea. But I didn't know what to do with that story. So I just kind of filed it away, forgot about it for a number of years until I met some freedivers. These are people who have, through the power of will, enabled themselves to hold their breath for six, seven, eight minutes at a time and dive to depths far below what any scientists thought possible. So I thought, wow, there's something in breathing here that I don't know about, and I figured other people might not know about as well. That's really interesting. I've known a bunch of freedivers, and I've known a bunch of jiu-jitsu people that got really into yoga, primarily because of Hicks and Gracie. Hicks and Gracie, do you know who he is? Oh, yeah. Yeah, famous, probably the most famous of the classic jiu-jitsu people. He's known as being the very best. He was one of the original real pioneers of jiu-jitsu in America as well. And there's this documentary on him called Choke. Have you seen it? I have not, no. It's really fascinating. This documentary, he's doing all this crazy stomach breath stuff, the yogi stuff, because he's really into yoga as well for flexibility and balance and all those different things. He was probably the first guy to introduce yoga to jiu-jitsu as well. But him and his son, who's also a world champion in jiu-jitsu, just stressed constantly that it's all about the breath and that breathing is everything. It's everything for jiu-jitsu. It's everything for martial arts. It's everything for your mindset. You're going to find that in the foundation of so many different sports. I think a lot of that has been forgotten. I know that coaches in the 50s used to have their runners take a big mouthful of water, run around the track, and then they'd have to spit out that same amount of water into a cup to force them to breathe through their nose, to force them to move their diaphragms up and down a little more, because breathing is so essential to the recovery, their endurance, and their performance. One of the things I find interesting about your book was the experiment with plugging up the nose for... What did you guys do for a month? Is that what it was? 10 days. 10 days. And that 10 days... My nose was broken most of my life. I had a useless nose till I was 40, and then I got an operation to have my deviated septum corrected and the turbinates shaved down. Man, it changed my life. It really did. I didn't realize... The term mouth breather is a really interesting term, because it's a term for a moron, but I felt like a moron after I got my nose fixed. I was like, why didn't I do this before? I was robbing myself of oxygen. Yeah. And there's so much science supporting how injurious it is to constantly be breathing through your mouth. There's no debate about that. But what people don't realize is about 25 to 50% of the population habitually breathes through their mouths. And they don't realize the neurological problems that this causes, the respiratory problems this causes, problems with snoring, sleep apnea, even metabolic disorders. I mean, it goes on and on and on. So I had been talking to the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. He'd done many interviews over a series of months. He's a big nose guy. So he said, this is the most amazing organ. No one's talking about it. At the NIH, there's no school for studying the nose and its effects. And he thought that that was criminal. So he had warned me how bad mouth breathing was. But no one knew how quickly that damage came on. So we knew that after years, it can change the structure of your face. It's so common in kids that it has a term called adenoid face. You see these kids with very long faces because they've been mouth breathing so long that their faces have actually the musculature and the skeleton has changed. It changes your skeleton. Yeah. Yeah. It creates a longer face. And that also makes these people much more apt to snoring and sleep apnea. But no one knew if a month of mouth breathing would be bad a year, like how soon those issues came on. So I asked him, I said, well, why don't you test it? You're one of the best universities in the world. You have the means to do this. And he thought, in his words, it would be unethical because he knew how damaging that it could be for people. And so I volunteered. I said, why don't you test it on me? I'll get somebody else to do it. They had no money for this. So we had to pay for this study just to experience what that was like. And the point wasn't to do some like jackass stunt. It was to lull ourselves into a position my body certainly knew. I think I was mouth breathing through much of my youth. And that 25% to 50% of the population knows. And to actually measure what happens. Now do you think there was some bacterial growth that was inside your nose as well from this? Do you think that some of that could be attributed to just the act of plugging the nose? Because you physically plugged it. It's not like you chose to breathe out of your mouth. You actually like see, you closed up the opening. Yeah, that's right. And it could. Everyone knows for sure. Because the less you use your nose, the less you're going to be able to use your nose. Just like any other muscle. So when people start habitually breathing through their mouths, their noses are going to start to close up. And we know this from the Doctor of Speech Language Pathology at Stanford. She measured people who had laryngectomy holes drilled in their throats so they could breathe. She found between two months and two years, their noses were completely blocked. Zero air coming in. So the more you use it, the more you're going to be able to use it. So the less you use it, the more apt you will be to have problems. What is the process? Why does the nose close up? It would seem that it's a hole. Why would that hole close? It's not in use. This terminates. All those tissues just start closing up. And so using your nose actually makes the opening wider? Absolutely. Really? Yeah, absolutely. My nose got physically wider after my operation. It's really strange. Look back on the photos from when I was 40 on my actual physical. And I attributed it to the fact that they put these big foam things and these plastic spacers in there because the doctor that did the operation, he's for, I forget the period of time afterwards, I had to have these things stuffed into my nose and this plastic that was sort of sutured in place to hold it into position. I attributed that to why my nose got wider. But I noticed it within a year or two afterwards, my fucking nose is wider. It's different. If I look at older pictures of myself, my nose is more narrow and now it's more flared out. And I felt like it was because of that. But now that you're saying this, now I'm thinking maybe it's just from breathing out of it. Well, surgical interventions are going to open that airway. There's no doubt about that. But we know the more that you breathe through your nose, the more that it's going to open up. And you can see this with people who are habitual mouth breathers, who are also joggers, who have just been breathing through their mouths for decades. They start breathing through the nose at the beginning. It's really, really hard. They say, I can't do this. This is awful. Then weeks go by, months go by, and their noses open up and allows them to breathe through the nose. And the benefits of that, they're innumerable. So many benefits of nasal breathing, not only oxygen, but it helps defend your body, humidifies air, conditions air, on and on and on. This is something I just don't think a lot of people realize. And from the researchers I've been talking to, they were a bit frustrated too. Seeing so many chronic conditions tied to mouth breathing and how so many of those could either be improved upon or sometimes outright cured by switching the pathway in which you breathe. So does breathing through your nose make your actual nostril opening wider? I don't know that. And I haven't seen any papers on that. So my nostril holes and everything, it's probably just from the surgical intervention and stuffing it with plastic and stretching it out. I would assume so. Now Wim Hof, who you reference in the book, he doesn't give a fuck about mouth breathing or mouth breathing. He just goes, just breathe, motherfucker. Breathe. That's what he says. Oh yeah, I practiced his mode of breathing all the time. I'm used to having his little voice in my head. Why doesn't he care about breathing from the nose or the mouth? He just wants you to breathe. Because if we're breathing 25,000 times a day, if you're taking 500 of those breaths through your mouth, it's not going to really make any impact on you. I'm talking about habitual mouth breathing. No, I understand. I'm just talking about through breathing exercises. So what he's done is he wants to make this easy and accessible for people. So many people can't breathe through their noses. So they go, they can't get that breath in, those 30 huge breaths you need to take. They take too long to do it. So he says it doesn't matter. Don't pay attention. You need to get that breath in. You need to expand your lungs. And for the rest of the time, the benefits of nasal breathing, that habitual breathing is so important to health. It seems so strange to me, reading your book, that I'm just learning this in terms of like, I mean, I've been doing athletics my whole life. How do I not know that breathing through the nose is more beneficial? How do coaches not know this? This is something I just got running up against over and over again. And when I first started writing this book, my friends who were journalists and authors, they said, you're writing a book about breathing? Why would you write a book about breathing? It's like walking. Yeah. Well, there's a good new book about walking. Really? So, they were ripping on me quite a bit until they heard some of the details of it. And the stuff is like, has been right in front of us the whole time. And it's so obvious that no one's really paying attention to it. And the scientific foundation, all the research is there. And that's what makes these researchers, these scientists, so frustrated. We have 50 years of rock solid science here, showing the problems with mouth breathing, showing the problems with snoring and sleep apnea. No one's really been paying attention. We're treating all these separate problems that are associated with these core issues. And we're not looking at the core issue. And I think that breathing has to be considered along with diet and exercise as a pillar of health. Because even if you eat keto, vegan, paleo, whatever, even if you exercise all the time, if you're not breathing right, you're never really going to be healthy. We know that to be the truth. So air comes through your mouth, air comes through your nose. What is the difference between the air coming through your nose? Okay. So your nose, if you were to take your fist, you've got a really big fist. So someone with a slightly smaller fist, and to take that fist and imagine just pushing it inside of your head, that's about the volume of your nose and all the sinus cavities. So they even stretch up above your eyes. So volume of your fist, that's crazy. It's about a billiard ball. So a little, it depends on what size fist you have, right? And they call it the nasal concha because it looks exactly like a seashell. If you were to split a seashell in half and look at it, that's what's happening in your nose. And all of this stuff evolved this way for a reason. So that air that comes in through the nose is slowed down, it's filtered, it's humidified, and it's conditioned. So by the time it gets to your lungs, your lungs can absorb that oxygen so much easier. And the nose is really the first line of defense. Another amazing thing with a nose is it produces something called nitric oxide, which is this wonderful molecule that is a vasodilator that plays in a central role in oxygen delivery and also helps battle off viruses and bacteria and other pathogens. So this is all happening in the nose and slowing down that air and all of these other functions allow us to gain about 20% more oxygen breathing through the nose than breathing through the mouth. So you can breathe less and get more by breathing through the nose. Wow. So breathing through the mouth, even though you're filling your lungs up, even though you're taking a big deep breath, you're filling your lungs up, you're not getting as much oxygen. That's right, because you can over breathe when people at a gym or when people are jogging and seeing them, really going to get the maximum amount of oxygen in. That's not what is happening to your body. So you're offloading the CO2. By offloading too much CO2, you're causing constriction in your circulation. So right now, if we were to breathe 30 huge breaths, you'll feel some tingling in your head. You'll feel some, maybe your fingertips will get cool, your toes will get cool. That's not from an increase of oxygen. It's the opposite that's happening. That's from a decrease of circulation. So your body wants to be in balance. You want to have the right amount of CO2 and oxygen for optimum delivery. And that's what the nose helps you to do. That was one of the craziest things about the book where you're talking about yogis that were able to vary the temperature between each hand. No, on the same hand. Oh, on the same hand. The same hand. One area was gray, the other was red. Oh, in the same... In the same, not even this and this. Oh my God. On the same hand. And when I came across this, people were saying, this is impossible. Who did the study? Some guy in Taos in his garage. No, it was at the manager clinic, which was the world's, at least in the US, the largest psychiatric research facility at the time. And a Navy physicist did these tests. It was reported in the New York Times. Has they been replicated? They haven't found someone who had the powers of Swami Rama. They found, I think, whims about as close as we've gotten to that guy.