Experiment 002
Reading time: 12 minutes
The first thing you do when you are born is breathe in. The last thing you do, whenever that is, is breathe out. In between you will do it around seven hundred million times and think about it almost never.
Weeks without food. Days without water. Minutes without this.
Your heart does not take instructions. Neither does your digestion, your pupils, your sweat. You cannot tell your heart to slow down.
Breathing is the only thing in your body that actually has a dial.
Every tradition on earth found it. Not a few of them. All of them.
Pranayama in the yoga sutras. Anapanasati in Buddhism, which just means mindfulness of breathing. Orthodox monks timing the Jesus Prayer to the breath, in and out. Sufi orders with breath awareness as a founding principle. None of these people knew each other. None of them had instruments. They all arrived at the same place: if you want to change how you feel, change how you breathe.
And every meditation you have ever heard of is a breathing practice wearing a different name. That is worth a piece of its own and it is coming.
My grandfather used to go under in the pool and I would count out loud until he came back up. I was around five. By eight or nine I was going down myself, diving deep in the Mediterranean, staying under for long stretches and working the sea urchins out from under the rocks. I would bring up a bag full and we would eat them freshly caught, right there. They were his favorite.
I never stopped.
Around 2001 a girlfriend got me into yoga, before yoga was the hype. Sivananda, and I did the whole thing: two yoga programs, two meditation programs, and then pranayama, the breathing one. Full programs, not a class you drop into. And they were all the same thing underneath. The yoga was breathing. The meditation was breathing.
A few years later I was living in the Caribbean, and that is where I started spearfishing. Other people use a rod. I go under and pick the one I want, and sometimes lobster, which is the real prize.
And when I swim, I do not turn my head to breathe like regular swimmers. I cross the pool underwater, come up, take one breath, go back down, and come back.
The dial
The exhale slows you down. The inhale speeds you up.
That is the whole mechanism. Everything else here is a variation on it.
Double in, one out
Two inhales through the nose. A long one, then a short sharp one on top of it. Then a long slow exhale out of the mouth.
One to three of them and you feel it. It has a real name, the physiological sigh, which is a terrible name for something this simple, so I call it double in, one out.
You already do it. You do it in your sleep every few minutes, and you have watched a child do it after crying, when the breath comes in twice in a stutter before it goes back out.
The second inhale is mechanical. Deep in your lungs are millions of tiny sacs where the exchange actually happens, and in ordinary quiet breathing some of them sag shut. The short second inhale pops them open again. Then the long exhale dumps the carbon dioxide.
Researchers at Stanford ran it for a month against box breathing, fast breathing and mindfulness meditation. The double inhale came out on top.
I use it in the car. Traffic that is not moving, or somebody cutting me off, and I can feel it coming up in my chest the way it does in everybody. Double in, one out, twice, and it is gone before I have moved another car length.
And when I am sitting across from a friend who is wound up about something, before anything else, I make them do the double inhale right there, in front of me. It takes five seconds and they always look up surprised.
The square
Inhale for four seconds. Hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold for four. Then go around again.
Box breathing, and the military teaches it, which is where it got its reputation.
It is slow breathing with a shape, and the shape is the point, because under pressure nobody remembers anything more complicated than a square.
There are others built the same way. Four seconds in, hold for seven, eight seconds out, which people call 4-7-8, is the same idea with the exhale stretched long, and that long exhale is why it gets used to fall asleep.
The other direction
Everything above is for coming down. Sometimes you want to go up.
Thirty deep breaths, in through the nose and down into the belly, each one released rather than fully pushed out. Then blow all the air out and hold empty until you feel the urge to breathe. Then one big breath in, hold it fifteen seconds, let it go. That is a round. Do three or four.
That is the Wim Hof method, and the hold at the end of it is the half people get backwards. You do not hold on full lungs. You empty out first and hold on nothing.
Here is why, and it is the most useful thing in this piece. The first urge to breathe is not your body running out of oxygen. It is carbon dioxide building up. That burning panic in your chest is an alarm, not an emergency. You have plenty of air left. Which means a breath hold does not train your lungs. It trains your tolerance for the alarm.
And that is what surprises people the first time they run the rounds properly. The second hold is longer than the first. The third is longer than the second. Nothing about your lungs changed in four minutes. What changed is how loudly your body shouted at you.
It is the same lever as a cold plunge. You walk into the alarm on purpose, at a dose you choose, so your body stops filing it under emergency. Fight or flight and rest and digest are not two switches somebody else is holding. There is an off ramp between them, and the off ramp is the exhale.
It is not new. Tummo, the Tibetan practice, has been doing a version of this for centuries, and a Frenchman called Maurice Daubard was teaching it in the fifties. What Hof did was strip it down to something you can learn in ten minutes, and then walk into a hospital and let them test it on him. They took twelve men he had trained, injected them with bacterial toxin, and watched them hold down their own inflammatory response. That is not supposed to be possible.
I can vouch for a piece of it. I started in 2019 and I still do it. I have not been sick since, and I never got COVID.
Look up a YouTube video for the instructions, or get the Wim Hof app, and follow the safety rules, they exist for a reason.
At the far end of the dial from all of that is yoga nidra. You lie down and a voice, usually a recording, walks you slowly through the body, part by part, while you stay still and awake. Nothing to achieve and nowhere to get to. The point is to reach the depth of rest that sleep gives you without going to sleep, which is why people use it to claw back a bad night. Andrew Huberman renamed it NSDR, non sleep deep rest, and that is the version that spread. Neither of them invented what they teach. They were the ones who repackaged it and handed it over in a way people can actually follow.
I can hold my breath for close to five minutes. Friends of mine who train far harder than I do, marathon runners, Ironman finishers, give out long before that. It was never about fitness and it was never about VO2max. VO2max is the ceiling on how much oxygen you can take in and use at full effort, and it is worth knowing, but it measures the engine, not your tolerance for the alarm. I jump rope hard and I do not run out of breath, and that is the same thing from the other direction: tolerance, not lungs.
Outside diving, it gets trained on purpose by boxers, swimmers, singers, wind players, and anyone whose work depends on the next breath.
And some people are built for it, by evolution rather than by practice. The Bajau, the sea nomads of Indonesia, carry spleens around fifty percent larger than their neighbors on land. Your spleen holds a reservoir of oxygen rich blood and squeezes it out when you dive. A thousand years of working underwater changed the organ.
Altitude does a smaller version of the same thing in weeks instead of centuries. Live high, breathe thin air, and your blood answers by carrying more, which is why runners train in the mountains and come down to race. You will also see people training in restriction masks, which is a different thing wearing the same story. The mask makes the breathing harder. It does not make the air thinner. What it trains is the muscles doing the pulling.
The route
All of that is rhythm. The other half is the route, and that is the half I had wrong for most of my life.
Your nose warms the air, humidifies it, filters it and slows it down. It also adds nitric oxide, which your sinuses make all day long, and which opens the blood vessels in your lungs. Your mouth does none of it. The mouth is the bigger opening, so it feels like more air, and that is exactly the trap.
I was a mouth breather for over forty five years.
I knew. My parents knew. I knew I had a deviated septum, I knew there was an operation for it, and it never bothered me enough to do anything about it. Then friends who got it fixed started saying the same sentence to me: you do not know what breathing is until you fix it. So I got curious and I started reading.
I went to the doctor for a proper diagnosis. It turned out to be a deviated septum and polyps, both. He started me on two nasal sprays, one a steroid and one saline, which is basically salt water, and kept booking me back a few months at a time. Six months of spraying every morning and I was certain I was being given the runaround.
By then I had watched a Huberman Lab episode on breathing, and it told me something nobody had: you can fix nasal breathing with exercises. So I picked up the protocol. Nasal breathing during training and cardio. Mindfulness about it during the day, catching myself the moment my mouth fell open. Mouth taping at night.
It worked. I am a nose breather now, and I never had the operation.
Mouth taping
A lot of nose breathers are mouth breathers at night and have no idea. You spend the whole day doing it properly and then your jaw drops the second you are unconscious.
And you wake up wrecked. Dry mouth, raw throat, eight hours that bought you nothing. You spent the night breathing the hard way, through more resistance and more noise, surfacing again and again without ever coming up far enough to remember it. The sleep was there. The rest was not.
A small piece of tape across the lips holds the mouth closed and hands the job back to the nose. People who try it say the same thing first: they wake up rested. Less snoring is the bonus that gets all the attention, but rested is the one that changes your day.
One caution, and it is short. Your nose has to be clear. If it is blocked, fix that first.
There are brands all over your feed selling branded mouth tape on subscription at ninety dollars a month, which is three dollars a night for a strip of tape. A roll of medical tape from the pharmacy costs a couple of dollars, lasts months, and does the same job.
The one that goes unchecked
The bigger thing underneath is sleep apnea, and it is a different animal.
Your airway collapses while you are asleep, so your breathing stops, then restarts, then stops again. In the severe cases that is dozens of times an hour, hundreds of times a night. Every one of them drops your blood oxygen and hauls you up out of deep sleep without ever waking you enough to know it happened.
Eight or nine out of every ten people who have it do not know they have it. They spend years exhausted, falling asleep in the afternoon, told it is stress, or age, or weight.
It takes one night with a small device you wear at home to find out, and the treatment is a device you wear at home too. Of everything in this piece, that is the one worth chasing.
Snoring
Snoring is not apnea, though they travel together. Snoring is the sound of air forcing its way past soft tissue in an airway that has narrowed, and it gets louder with alcohol, with a late night, and with every extra pound. It is the one symptom the whole household can hear, and the one everybody has agreed to find funny. It is also how couples end up sleeping in separate bedrooms, which nobody files as a medical outcome and everybody should.
Snoring is not a personality trait. It is a breathing problem, and it is fixable. Fixing it usually starts with the nose, then your sleeping position, then body weight. And if it is apnea underneath, that is a test, not a guess.
The face
Research shows that years of mouth breathing change the shape of a face. It pulls the face longer, sets the jaw further back, and the teeth stop meeting the way they should.
Forty two monkeys had their nasal passages plugged and were made to breathe through their mouths for up to three years. Their faces grew differently: longer, with a steeper jaw angle and a bite that no longer closed properly. When the plugs came out, the soft tissue went back to normal within months.
Research is starting to show something similar in children who are still growing: fix the breathing early enough and the face can find its way back. There is a book about all of this called Jaws, and Huberman talks about it too. In adults the research is not there yet.
Humming
Humans hum. In every religion, in every language, in the car and in the shower. Monks chant, mothers hum to babies, and none of them knew why, it just felt right.
One of the oldest is Om, the syllable Hindu tradition says the universe is built out of, hummed for three thousand years before anybody could measure anything.
Then somebody measured it in a lab, and the nitric oxide in the nose went up fifteen fold. Not fifteen percent, fifteen times. It was published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, which is not where you expect to be told that the noise your grandmother made over the stove was doing something.
That is the same nitric oxide I wrote about in the Sun piece and promised to come back to. It opens the vessels in your lungs and kills bacteria on the way through, and a closed mouth and a low note flood the whole cavity with it. There is far more to this molecule, and to what the vibration itself is doing, than one section can hold. I will come back to both.
Salt
I breathe better at the beach. Everybody does.
Part of it is the salt, and not just the water you swim in. The sea throws salt into the humidity, so the air itself is carrying it and you are breathing it the entire time you stand there. Salt water on the lining of your nose thins the mucus and washes the airway, and it is one of the cheapest things in medicine that reliably works.
That is all a neti pot is, and yogis have been using one for centuries. Then somebody packaged the same idea into little sachets and a squeeze bottle, and is making a killing selling people salt.
A doctor in Poland worked at a salt mine in the eighteen hundreds and noticed the miners were not getting the lung diseases everyone else got. He wrote it up. That mine is a treatment center now, and the state health service pays to send patients down there.
So when you land somewhere salty and your nose opens on its own, that is not in your head. One more reason to go to the sea, next to the sun, which I have already written about, and the grounding, which I will get to. Salt has its own story, and it is not the villain you were told it was.
Fat combustion
One more thing most people do not know.
When you lose fat, you breathe it out. Fat burns the way fuel burns in a car, carbon and hydrogen meeting oxygen, and around eighty four percent of the mass leaves through your lungs.
Your lungs are the door fat leaves by. Carbohydrate takes the same road out.
Which reframes everything. You are doing it right now, slowly, sitting still. The moment you move you burn more, and you breathe harder to carry it out. Running, lifting, hauling shopping up the stairs: when your breathing goes ragged that is not a side effect of the work, that is the combustion leaving. Same as revving an engine hard. More fuel burned, more coming out of the exhaust.
You are the exhaust.
Almost nothing in you takes an order. Your heart, your gut, your pupils. None of them listen to words. They do listen to your breathing.
That is what the dial is for. No tools, no machines, no gimmicks, nothing to buy. Everything in this piece you can run right now, tonight, with what you were issued at birth.
You have been doing it without a thought since the day you were born, and you will until your last breath.
Experiment 002 is complete. You just read it.
Georges
The long version of who is writing this is on the About page. Fifty years of taking things apart, in one place.
Usually one Experiment on Sunday. Lab Notes in between. Free.