This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang I know, I know know that at times the whole self-improvement game can seem like a never-ending

hallway filled with limitless shame and insufficiency, so I fully sympathize with anybody who might greet the following

news with some measure of resistance.

Okay here's the news.

Turns out many of us are, of all things things breathing incorrectly.

Again, I understand there may be some resistance here, but my advice is to approach

this news as an opportunity.

My guest today argues that fixing your breathing

can help you with all sorts of ailments, both physical and psychological. What's

more the history of how our breathing got screwed up in the first place is

totally fascinating.

James Nester is somebody I've wanted to have on the show for a long time.

He's a science journalist who wrote a book called Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art,

which spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list

and was translated into 35 languages. In this conversation we talk about how he

got interested in breathing in the first place, why we are the worst

breathers in the animal kingdom, he says, the importance of posture,

the deleterious effects of mouth breathing, and why we need to chew more, the relationship

between breathing and anxiety, the relationship between breathing and sleep, and then we

dive into a whole bunch of breathing exercises, many of them pioneered by a group he calls the

pulmonauts. I love that name. Just to say before we dive in here, this episode is part of our Deep Cutts series where we dig

into the archives and find some of our most popular episodes and repost them. When you're hiring, it feels amazing to finally close out a job search.

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