Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

For most of us, breathing is an automatic function, just something we do 25,000 times a day. But the new science of breath is showing us that how we take in and exhale breath can have a significant and lasting impact on immune health, athletic endurance, mental states, and lifespan. Science journalist James Nestor embedded with respiratory researchers at Stanford (Dr. Jayakar Nayak at the Stanford Otolaryngology), University of Pennsylvania, and several more institutions over three years, and discovered that the ways in which we breathe are in many ways as important to our health and well-being as what we eat or how much we exercise. Breathing is a missing pillar of health and our attention to it is long overdue.
James Nestor has written for Scientific American, Outside, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more. His latest book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, was released May 26, 2020 by Riverhead/Penguin Random House. Breath has been a New York Times and London Sunday Times bestseller since release and will be translated into more than 20 languages in 2021. Nestor’s first book, Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, was published in 2014 and was a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award For Literary Sports Writing, an Amazon Best Science Book, and more. Nestor lives and breathes in San Francisco.