A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book
of 2020 by NPR A fascinating scientific cultural spiritual and evolutionary history of the
way humans breathe-and how we've all been doing it wrong for a long long time. -Elizabeth
Gilbert author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat how much you exercise
how skinny or young or wise you are none of it matters if you're not breathing properly. There
is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in let it out
repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet as a species humans have lost the ability to
breathe correctly with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure
out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren't found in pulmonology labs as we
might expect but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites secret Soviet facilities New
Jersey choir schools and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women
exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama Sudarshan Kriya
and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about
how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we
inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance rejuvenate internal organs halt snoring
asthma and autoimmune disease and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be
possible and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge
studies in pulmonology psychology biochemistry and human physiology Breath turns the
conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its
head. You will never breathe the same again.
