Mondays with Mike: Breathe in, breathe out

During the dot.com craze I worked for a tech firm. Together with my colleagues, we alternately experienced exhilaration, a sense of triumph, and a sense of doom. Sometimes all within 24 hours. At moments, we believed we would one day rule the world. Then, some news would make us wonder whether we’d still be in business in three months.

Stress weighed on everyone—especially at the top. But even plebes like me suffered from it. There were moments when I thought my head was going to explode right there at my desk. You likely know the feeling.

On a flight home from a business trip, I sat next to a serviceman and got into a long strangers on the plane discussion. The guy had an enormous intellect and had a deep interest in Buddhism and Eastern medicine. As we stood up to file out, he handed me a little paperback called “Living Buddha, Living Christ,” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

“Are you sure,” I asked.

“Just promise me you’ll read it,” he said. We wished each other well and that’s the last I ever saw of my seatmate.

I’m a skeptic by nature, and often a cynic. I’m not particularly religious, though I believe there’s a big force out there that most of us are trying to understand. On my own, I would’ve never been inclined to read such a book. But the thoughtfulness of the gift was compelling. And, well, I made a promise.

I read it, and I’m glad I did. The book itself is a kind of meditation, and it includes simple breathing and meditative exercises.

I read it back in oh, 1996. When I’d feel the pressure and stress building and could picture it bursting out of my chest like the Alien, I’d close the door to my office (oh, for real offices again), sit, and practice these little exercises. It only took five or 10 minutes to slow my pulse, and presumably lowered my blood pressure.

And for years since then, I’ve used those exercises whenever necessary. On June 2nd of this year, my birthday, Beth gifted me a book entitled “Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art.” She and I had listened to a radio interview with the author, James Nestor.

Years earlier Nestor wrote a book called “Deep” about free divers—people who can hold their breath and swim underwater for 10 minutes at a time. When Nestor learned that they’d trained themselves to increase lung capacity, he was fascinated.

Motivated also by his own chronic maladies, including respiratory and sinus issues, he went on a 10-year personal research crusade.

In “Breath,” he takes the reader around the globe, meeting cutting edge breathing experts he calls “pulmonauts.” Some are credentialed researchers and scientists. Others came from all walks of life, and had been helped by one or another breathing technique and were driven to learn more.

The author signs up for a harrowing experiment that requires him to breathe only through his mouth for 10 days, then normally for 10 days, then only through his nose for 10 days. The physiological results for nose breathing compared to the other methods were stunningly improved.

He also crawls deep beneath Paris in its catacombs to study…skulls. Turns out mouths used to be a lot bigger than they are now. When our ancestors learned to cook and otherwise process food, they chewed less, and over time, our mouths got smaller. Our airways also got smaller, and…our teeth got crooked. Skulls before that uniformly showed perfectly straight teeth, all without braces.

As it turns out, people have been studying and practicing intentional therapeutic breathing techniques pretty much forever across cultures, religions and geographies. And they arrived at strikingly similar conclusions about how to breathe. From the book:

In 2001, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy gather two dozen subjects, covered them with sensors to measure blood flow, heart rate and nervous system feedback, then had them recite a Buddhist mantra as well as the original Latin version of the rosary, the Catholic prayer cycle of the Ave Maria, which is repeated half by a priest and half by the congregation. They were stunned to find the average number of breaths for each cycle was “almost exactly” identical, just a bit quicker than the Hindu, Taoist, and Native American prayers: 5.5 breaths per minute.

But what was even more stunning was what breathing like this did to the subjects. Whenever they followed this slow breathing pattern, blood flow to the brain increased and the systems in the body entered state of coherence, when the functions of the heart, circulation, and nervous system are coordinated to peak efficiency.

Lately, breath and breathing (and the denial thereof) have been headline subjects on more than one front. After my bout with covid19, I’ve had a hard time filling my lungs to their fullest. I can’t climb flights of stairs like I used to, and the shortest of walks can leave me winded. After some exercise and using techniques from this book, that’s improving.

It’s easy to take breathing for granted. I never will again.