Celeste McGovern looks at the top ways to fix your breathing for better health

We do it 25,000 times or so per day but rarely give it a passing thought. The life-sustaining work of inhaling and exhaling, infusing every cell of our body with oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide, happens automatically for us, usually a dozen times a minute or more without a single conscious effort on our part.

Like circulating blood, breathing is effortless. It’s the most basic bodily function—if you’re not breathing at all, you’re dead. Yet there is a growing awareness that most of us are doing it all wrong.

“The vast majority of us are breathing dysfunctionally,” says James Nestor, journalist and bestselling author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (Riverhead Books, 2020). “I know that sounds crazy, but then you look at the science.”

Since the dawn of industrialization, research shows, human jaws have been shrinking—mostly due to insufficient chewing on a diet of soft industrialized foods—and consequently our nasal passages have narrowed, too. As a result, compared to our ancestors, most of us are compensating by breathing too much air, too fast and too shallow, and through our mouths rather than through our withered nasal passages.

Add other features of modern living to the picture, and it gets worse. Our necks are bent over blue light screens. Our mouths often hang open.

“We spend 90 percent of our time indoors now, and most of that time is spent sitting in away that is not conducive to healthy breathing,” says Nestor. “You add to that pollution, allergens, very tight clothes that aren’t conducive to healthy breathing, and you’ve got this perfect storm for respiratory disaster, which is what has happened to this planet right now.”

The problem is exacerbated by our low tolerance for stress, too, says Nestor. Our ancestors faced almost constant threats to their survival, from starvation to frigid temperatures and other menaces of nature, but industrialized life is relatively easygoing. Despite that, we generally don’t handle stress well.

Breathing dysfunction and high stress reactions feed back to each other in a negative loop, says Nestor, and they’re not benign. We can survive a long time while puffing on shallow breaths, but it impacts our health.

“The majority of diseases we suffer from are diseases of civilization,” Nestor told WDDTY. “You can eat the right foods, exercise every day, and sleep eight hours, but if you’re not breathing right, you are not healthy.”