In Breath, Dr. James Nestor tells us:
“No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how resilient our genes are, how skinny or young or wise we are—none of it will matter unless we’re breathing correctly. That’s what these researchers discovered. The missing pillar in health is breath. It all starts here. More recently, science has begun testing what the ancient Tibetans understood intuitively. In the 1980s, researchers with the Framingham Study, a 70-year longitudinal research program focused on heart disease, attempted to find out if lung size really did correlate to longevity. They gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity. The smaller and less efficient lungs became, the quicker subjects got sick and died. The cause of deterioration didn’t matter. Smaller meant shorter. But larger lungs equaled longer lives. Our ability to breathe full breaths was, according to the researchers, ‘literally a measure of living capacity.‘”
Nice! The missing pillar of health is breath. In one study of 5,200 subjects, lung capacity was a more significant predictor of life than genetics, diet, and daily exercise.
You can live for weeks without food, days without water, and minutes without breath. Anything you can’t live without for minutes is worth paying extra attention to.
With 5 to 10 breaths, I can regularly lower my blood pressure by 10 points.
