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.
