Welcome to Chasing Life.

If you are listening to this podcast, you are breathing.

And no offense, but there's a very good chance that you're doing it wrong.

The average person takes something like 20,000 breaths per day, more than 7 million a year.

And I've always thought of each of those as a reflex,

something we instinctually do, rather than a skill that we can hone. But for me, that changed in

2020. As a global pandemic attacked our respiratory systems, this timely book came out

called Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. I read it, and it blew me away.

Chronic diseases, brain function, even the way we physically look, the way our faces look. The author,

journalist James Nestor, argues that mounds of scientific research makes clear

that all those things can be direct consequences of the way we breathe. And he wrote that as

many as 90% of us are doing it incorrectly. But something that really struck me was the next

part of his argument.

Whether you have asthma or snoring or sleep apnea, COPD, or nasal congestion during allergy season, all of these are signs that you're not breathing well. And just adhering to a few extremely basic, deceptively simple guidelines, you can restore a lot of those issues.

So a new anniversary edition of Breath is out now, and I invited James onto the show to talk about what he has learned since the book came out.

This is a really fascinating conversation. We're going to explore

how your diet can shape your face, how you can boost your stamina like Olympians just by how

you breathe, and how your child's nighttime breathing can impact their development. Most importantly,

we cover practical and immediately actionable ways to improve our health one breath at a time,

even the way that your tongue is currently sitting in your mouth.

You can change that, and that changes everything.

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, and this is chasing life.

...