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Medicine Science

Breathing Habits Are Related To Physical and Mental Health (wsj.com) 78

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal, written by James Nestor: Breathing is a missing pillar of health, and our attention to it is long overdue. Most of us misunderstand breathing. We see it as passive, something that we just do. Breathe, live; stop breathing, die. But breathing is not that simple and binary. How we breathe matters, too. Inside the breath you just took, there are more molecules of air than there are grains of sand on all the world's beaches. We each inhale and exhale some 30 pounds of these molecules every day -- far more than we eat or drink. The way that we take in that air and expel it is as important as what we eat, how much we exercise and the genes we've inherited. This idea may sound nuts, I realize. It certainly sounded that way to me when I first heard it several years ago while interviewing neurologists, rhinologists and pulmonologists at Stanford, Harvard and other institutions. What they'd found is that breathing habits were directly related to physical and mental health.

Today, doctors who study breathing say that the vast majority of Americans do it inadequately. [...] But it's not all bad news. Unlike problems with other parts of the body, such as the liver or kidneys, we can improve the airways in our too-small mouths and reverse the entropy in our lungs at any age. We can do this by breathing properly. [...] [T]he first step in healthy breathing: extending breaths to make them a little deeper, a little longer. Try it. For the next several minutes, inhale gently through your nose to a count of about five and then exhale, again through your nose, at the same rate or a little more slowly if you can. This works out to about six breaths a minute. When we breathe like this we can better protect the lungs from irritation and infection while boosting circulation to the brain and body. Stress on the heart relaxes; the respiratory and nervous systems enter a state of coherence where everything functions at peak efficiency. Just a few minutes of inhaling and exhaling at this pace can drop blood pressure by 10, even 15 points. [...] [T]he second step in healthy breathing: Breathe through your nose. Nasal breathing not only helps with snoring and some mild cases of sleep apnea, it also can allow us to absorb around 18% more oxygen than breathing through our mouths. It reduces the risk of dental cavities and respiratory problems and likely boosts sexual performance. The list goes on.

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Breathing Habits Are Related To Physical and Mental Health

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  • by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Saturday May 23, 2020 @08:04AM (#60094092)
    but unfortunately it's paywalled.
    • Fun Fact (Score:5, Informative)

      by sycodon ( 149926 ) on Saturday May 23, 2020 @08:36AM (#60094160)

      When you lose weight, 90% of that weight exits the body through breathing. [youtube.com]

      • Nice try, but incorrect. That fluid exchange doesn't change very much with your weight. Instead, you piss it out as your body achieves a slightly different balance. Your extra fat is 90% piss.

        The water you lose during exercise is replaced, it is later when your body settles on a new fluid balance. So it isn't the same water.

        • Nice try, but incorrect.

          No, the poster was indeed correct. By mass the vast majority of fat burned is expelled as gas. Take a look at a triglyceride [wikipedia.org]. By mass it's almost all carbon. All that carbon is expelled as carbon dioxide through your breath. Urine is comprised of water, amonia, and uric acid. Primarily this is to expel excess water and nitrogen, generally from the metabolism of proteins. There is no nitrogen in fat. You expel burned fat as CO2, not in your urine.

          • You forgot to weigh the water that your body maintains in proportion to that fat.

            We're talking about lost weight, not lost fat.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      If we breathe more, we will use up the worlds oxygen supply quicker!

    • I think we should officially declare, that something either is science, or it is paywalled. Those two are mutually exclusive.

      • All information belongs to all of us. Because we want it. Even when some private entity paid for it. Anything not free is bad.
        • Unless it's YOUR information. Then the GDPR kicks in, and no one can have it.
        • by znrt ( 2424692 )

          personally, i couldn't give a damn about the wall street journal ...

          however, providing paywalled links seems nonsense to me, unless it's just advertising. oh wait ...

        • We've had that thread here. Organizing, reviewing, editing and publishing that information costs time, work, and money. It's why Aaron Swarz was a criminal, and why libraries charge membership fees, and why newspapers cost money.

          • The Toronto Public Library does NOT charge a membership fee. Just because you Americans think that everything should be privatized doesn't mean the rest of the world agrees.
      • by west ( 39918 )

        Articles aren't science, they're the transmission of information about science. And some media would like to be paid directly, and some prefer to inundate us with ads.

        As for science, that is almost anything but free.

    • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Saturday May 23, 2020 @09:25AM (#60094318)

      "I'd love to read the original article,..."

      You must be new here, nobody does.

    • It seems to be saying that Americans are a bunch of mouthbreathers.

    • Literally the first two hits are a working plugin.

      This one is for Firefox [github.com]

      This one is for Chrome [github.com]

      There is an ever growing list of sites it works on. I found it from an investment subreddit where many people want to read WSJ/Bloomberg etc

      Pre-edit. I guess they merged the repos but I'm too lazy to redo the links. They will still get you there.

    • but unfortunately it's paywalled.

      Who cares?

      From the summary:

      Breathing is a missing pillar of health, and our attention to it is long overdue. Most of us misunderstand breathing. We see it as passive, something that we just do.

      What more does a nerd need to read? This is a story for idiots, that have never had any curiosity about the subject before. That's why they're starting out this ignorant of the subject. When people tell them, "take a deep breath" they don't understand; this isn't hyperbole. Please do it. They'll laugh and refuse, "You're not telling me what to do!" They don't comprehend that their IQ goes up when they inhale, and then slopes down until the next breath. If you're talking the whole

      • User involvement in breathing is medically sound. My respirologist advised me to take up the didgeridoo to strengthen my diaphragm do combat OSA and paresis. He also admitted he didn't expect me to do it.
      • oh, insightful

  • All together! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by queazocotal ( 915608 ) on Saturday May 23, 2020 @08:06AM (#60094098)
    Correlation is not causation!
    Walking with a limp due to an artificial foot does not mean that if you manage to correct the limp the foot regrows.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Correlation is not causation!
      Walking with a limp due to an artificial foot does not mean that if you manage to correct the limp the foot regrows.

      What??? And here I thought...

      Pretty much the best illustrative example I have seen so far though. I think I am going to use that one in the future.

      • by pedz ( 4127433 )
        My favorite correlation is not causation: areas with the most police have the highest crime rates
        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          My favorite correlation is not causation: areas with the most police have the highest crime rates

          Actually, that _is_ a correlation, at least partially. All that police has to be kept busy, so when you have a lot of police and the crime rate actually drops, something has to be done about it. All those police does not want to lose their jobs, after all. So they _find_ crime. Also, the more police, the more an "us vs. them" mindset and things start to deteriorate.

          And if you start counting crimes committed by a police-force that has gotten too large and too isolated and out of touch with the citizens they

    • Yes, you are technically correct.
      But in actuality, *everything* is mere correlation. It's literally all we got.
      Even when you are "proving" something false with a counter-example, you are always correlating things to do that. There is no escape. Trust me, countless scientists and mathematicians tried over the centuries and millennia. (Check out Gödel's incompleteness theorem. It kills another one of Munroe's pet dogmas: Mathematics being the "hardest" science... Without physics, it is not a science at a

      • Causation is absolutely provable, and it does exist. Your reasoning is fundamentally flawed. Your'e arguing against all induction.

        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Induction, except "mathematical induction" ( https://www.mathsisfun.com/alg... [mathsisfun.com] ) is unreliable.

          That said, the assertion that "correlation is all we have" in incorrect. Theories are not the same as correlation. I would also argue that tests of theories are also different from correlation.

          *That* said, when you really get down to basics you can't be sure of anything. Even "I think therefore I am" is a bit dubious. We live in a universe of estimated (not calculated) probabilities.

          Given all the above, correl

          • Socrates demonstrated the need for inductive reasoning ages ago. That hasn't changed. It's only as flawed as our senses and our ability to interpret what data we may collect. Causation may still be proved, at least in the classical sense.

      • By rallying against someone who claims everything is is correlation, you equating odds of a billion:1 with 1:billion. Sure, in each event described by such odds each is "mere correlation", but claiming that discounts reality and puts wishful magic on the same level as the "scientific[.5sic] method". They aren't the same. Now sure, blindly adhering to the scientific method and believing that conducting such studies are even possible(!!!), is another set of blinders.

        The idea that someone can really "hold

    • Correlation is not causation!

      Correlation is not causation, but it it is evidence of causation. Further, it's effectively proof that there is some causal relationship, it just doesn't tell you which direction, or if perhaps both of the correlated observations are caused by another factor (or factors).

      I think too often this "correlation is not causation" meme is used to deny that any causation could exist. Also, it's often stated with the apparent implication that it's news to researchers, and that they have no way to disentangle the

      • Correlation is not causation, but it it is evidence of causation. Further, it's effectively proof that there is some causal relationship, it just doesn't tell you which direction, or if perhaps both of the correlated observations are caused by another factor (or factors).

        You left out one (common) possibility. The correlation can be complete coincidence.

        "Correlation is not causation" is not a meme. It's correcting a common a logical fallacy that plagues science and popular culture. Wikipedia explains this better than I could ever hope to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        A great example from the article:
        The result of the last home game by the Washington Redskins prior to the presidential election predicted the outcome of every presidential election from 1936 to 2000 inclusiv

    • Considering that we all spend 99% of our day breathing on automatic, it really doesn't matter anyway. I'm pretty sure that 4.3 billion years of evolution didn't leave us with an automatic breathing mechanism that insufficiently exchanges air.

  • "More molecules of air than there are grains of sand on all the world's beaches." Seriously? I do not know whether the original work has some scientific merit, but this article here strikes me as having all the signs of esoteric pseudo-profound bullshit that is mostly just appealing to your sense of wonder and has somewhere between very little and no merit at all. I would recommend ignoring it.

    • by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Saturday May 23, 2020 @08:38AM (#60094172) Journal

      Wanted to comment on this, too.

      Even if there is a core of validity, it's completely buried under a mountain of woo buzzwords and mysticism.

      Not all that surprisingly, the author of this article, James Nestor, has a book all about this subject coming out in a few days. How much do you want to bet that the "anonymous reader" who submitted this is a publicist?
      =Smidge=

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Not all that surprisingly, the author of this article, James Nestor, has a book all about this subject coming out in a few days. How much do you want to bet that the "anonymous reader" who submitted this is a publicist?
        =Smidge=

        Things start to make sense now...

    • Nothing wrong with the sense of wonder, I must add.
      But other than that... yeah...

  • by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Saturday May 23, 2020 @08:20AM (#60094122)

    Due to a ton of allergies, I was in my mid twenties before I even knew you could breath through your nose.

  • This is yet another case of turning a symptom into a cause, disrupting existing natural systems.

    If we breathe the "wrong" way, that is because our bodies and our environment told our subconscious system it should breathe that way for a reason.
    The answer is not, to force yourself to breathe differently for a minute, deluding yourself into believing you can change your subconscious automatic breathing by doing that, before obviously going back to your how you did it before.
    The answer is to find out why we bre

  • by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Saturday May 23, 2020 @08:35AM (#60094150)

    Nasal breathing ... likely boosts sexual performance

    Depends what you are doing!

  • It's overrated. I just immerse myself in essential oils.
  • For some reason when I read the last part of the summary, where breathing through the nose would likely help sexual performance, I can't help think about waking up to a creepy guy looking at me breathing heavily.... *shudder*

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Air? Never touch the stuff. Plants jizz in it.

  • As mentioned on /. in the past, being in a room with too many people can cause you some mental sharpness due to the amount of carbon carbon monoxide in the room. Also, wearing a face mask can do the same thing due to re-breathing your own CO2. That is why some masks have a vent that lets air out, but not back in (and more expensive ones are piping fresh air in).

    And for all the intelligent design folks, it's a f'ing stupid god damn design that there is a difference between breathing through your mouth and br

    • by Nkwe ( 604125 )

      Also, wearing a face mask can do the same thing due to re-breathing your own CO2. That is why some masks have a vent that lets air out, but not back in (and more expensive ones are piping fresh air in).

      Of course using such masks for *general population* COVID control kind of defeats the primary purpose of the masks which is to prevent the mask wearer from spreading the virus. While wearing a mask with a vent is better than no mask, it can send a selfish message: "I am going to protect myself, but I don't care about you."

    • If the carbon monoxide goes up from people breathing, you keep some strange company. Carbon dioxide, maybe.

  • by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Saturday May 23, 2020 @08:55AM (#60094228) Homepage Journal

    Pranayama or controlled breathing is an intrinsic part of Yoga.

    Hindu, Buddhist monks use it to calm the mind down in preparation for meditation. The cardiovascular benefits have also been well known in yogic wisdom.

    One NIH study there are others.
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]

    • Yeah, but - some web science cheerleaders say it's not proper science - so... checkmate Hindu Yogis.

      • by znrt ( 2424692 )

        i've no idea if it is legitimate science or not, but it's not only hindus and yoga. conscious breathing is fundamental in e.g. most oriental martial arts and there are lots (lots!) of different techniques and practices (most if not all of them afaik enforce breathing in through the nose, btw), and in general oriental cultures are far more body aware than we are in the west. all i can say is that it mostly works. their science may be behind (now), but traditionally they have put a lot more attention to basic

        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Their empirical results are undeniable, but their theoretical explanations are...untrustworthy.

          • by znrt ( 2424692 )

            fair enough, actually some of their theoretical explanations can be straight nonsense, even religious drivel. i tend to interpret them as merely illustrative metaphors from ancient times for simple people. it gets specially hilarious when you have today's westerners picking that up, specially about the trendy yadda-yadda exercise of the season. but, yes, much of it is rooted on experience and just works.

        • What cultures? Did you say "oriental"? Is this 1955 on your calendar?
          • by znrt ( 2424692 )

            thanks, i just learned that "oriental" has pejorative connotation in north america.

            well, the things you know! i guess together with the rest of the world i'll just shrug and wish you guys all the best in dealing with your traumas around ... words? (and eventually even get at the deeper issues which caused them?) (don't worry, every culture has them. just not many cultures think of themselves as spanning the whole world).

            i also advise any possibly upset north american reader of my post to know that there is

    • Then we have Practayama. See Journal of Applied Yoga, "How to market breathing to an ADD audience". JAP (3218:19)
  • Failing to breathe is very bad for your physical and mental health.

  • > Nasal breathing [...] can allow us to absorb around 18% more oxygen than breathing through our mouths.

    Can somebody tell me by which mechanism this is supposed to happen?

    I have a counter-hypothesis: You can get more oxygen by breathing through your mouth. Here's some evidence: When you are running, you can only afford to breathe through your nose at a very slow pace. As soon as you need more oxygen, you start breathing through your mouth. I also have a proposed mechanism for how this happens: The mouth
    • So... you're a mouth breather?
    • Breathing through the nose adds a lot of resistance (some measure it at 50%). When you exhale, the pressure in the lungs gets higher and this improves blood perfusion. Similarly, when breathing in you have an increased vacuum which results in more oxygen being transported. When you run, you trade efficiency for volume; the breathing is less efficient, but you move a higher volume.
      There is a lot more to nasal breathing (since air gets cleaned, warmed and humidified) but we also have receptors in the nose
      • "an increased vacuum ...results in more oxygen being transported." Pray tell, why?

        I once lived in Quito, which is just over 9000 feet above sea level, so the air is considerably thinner. A much better vacuum than your lungs + diaphragm could hope to produce by breathing, regardless of what you breath through. And believe you me, that results in a lot *less* oxygen being transported, at least until your body acclimates.

  • Science does a fantastic job of explaining why, or how, something is true. But to do so, it needs a huge sample size of evidence, a control group, and a heck of a lot of time -- oh, and enough reproducibility that it can be corroborated by others.

    "Missing pillar of health" my ass. Ever take golf lessons? How about singing lessons? Speaking lessons? What about yoga, or martial arts? How about navy seal training? Sniper training? What about every psychologist's couch? Poker? Sauna? Music? Boxing?

  • I've played a brass instrument all of my life. You learn to control your breathing so you have enough air to finish a phrase before starting another. I've noticed that after a practice session I always feel better both mentally and physically than when I started. Its a great feeling.
  • In the AF, there was Remedial classes for all sorts of basic things that some recruits just werenâ(TM)t taught growing up, reading being the key one.
    The running joke was really stupid people got sent to Remedial Breathing class :)

  • Yes, I agree as well! Look at Yoga and Meditation. Just by breathing it can reduce some of the chronic negative effects of stress. That’s why breathing (pranayama), is important in yoga. Hopefully more people will learn more about breathing techniques as it has many benefits.

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