Five stars. Would keep breathing.

Just kidding.

My sister gave me this book. I don’t know how she knew it, but I’m a horrible mouth-breather. I also have a habit of holding my breath when: in pain, concentrating, doing a delicate task, listening to someone talk. (I exhale when they finish the sentence. So don’t pause.) Turns out, breath-holding throughout the day might be causing a lot of people chronic anxiety and also causing them to “overbreathe.” Since reading, I’ve been at work to change my ways.

It’s rather shocking to realize the extent to which breathing through the nose affects nearly all other aspects of our health, even aspects that you wouldn’t expect, such as biochemistry and bone structure. But on reflection, it makes sense. We were designed to nose breathe; there is a reason for the way the air is routed through our sinuses; there is even a reason we have two nostrils. (Did you know that air taken in through the right nostril has a different effect than the left … and that your nostrils naturally tag-team throughout the day? Wild!) It makes sense that the more restricted supply of air coming in through our nose compared to our mouth is not only adequate but optimal, even though it doesn’t feel that way for recovering mouth-breathers.

It also makes sense that we were designed spend many hours a day chewing on tough foods (fruit, nuts, wild game), and that this regular daily workout of our jaw muscles would result in wider facial bones, flatter palates, and wider nose-breathing passages. It also explains why so many people in the modern age have crooked teeth: it’s not bad genetic design, it’s that we aren’t chewing enough and our face bones are literally atrophying, making our mouths too narrow. So those cave people who didn’t have orthodontists, also didn’t need them. (Shoutout to my characters! Keep eating game, guys!)

Ahem. Back to the book …

You have to watch out for the usual non sequiters that we have come to expect from Darwinian materialists. Almost any place that Nestor writes, “We evolved to …”, you can safely substitute, “We were designed to …” and come up with the same conclusion. There are a few long paragraphs about how “early life” was anaerobic and how “we” started using oxygen in “our” metabolizing. I skipped those; you can read them if you want to find out how bacteria do things differently from human beings.

Then there is the section on prayer, which finds that the repetitive prayers from all around the world get their practitioners breathing at the ideal rate for humans, which to Nestor’s mind can account for all the health, mind clarity, and relaxation benefits of prayer. (I have long been aware that my breathing changes when I pray – even silently – but this is not to say that there is nothing else going on during prayer or meditation, or that it matters not to whom or to what you pray.)

As someone who doesn’t believe that the spiritual world is a thing, Nestor is free to try – and qualifiedly endorse – all the yoga practices that, he says, are merely applied medical knowledge about breathing and posture. They certainly include some of that, but yoga is also a serious attempt to commune with spiritual entities, and we ignore that at our peril.

There is a helpful appendix that catalogs all the breathing techniques Nestor encountered on his ten-year journey. My big takeaway: breathe through your nose. Tape your mouth shut at night if you have to. Breathe a little slower … you won’t choke. Exhale completely before inhaling. See how many health and emotional problems that clears up for you. I’ll check back in and let you guys know whether I lost any weight.