Among my very first memories was struggling to catch a breath. Every spring in the Sussex woodlands I grew up around, the pollen descended like an invisible mist, and my lungs seized up. I’d be in my bed unable to lie down flat because if I did, the suffocation would overwhelm me. I would prop my head up on two pillows and try to sleep, my lungs wheezing back and forth like a battered accordion.
At first, I tried leaning out of my bedroom window, to breathe fresh, cooler air — but, of course, that could make things worse. I had cloth handkerchiefs to cough up into, as I bobbed along in a sea of seemingly endless phlegm. On some nights, I ran out of hankies and found myself coughing onto my sheets and bed spread and pillows. Snot was everywhere. My mum would occasionally round up all the hankies, and boil them in a pot, like a pudding, to somehow sanitize them, the steam hanging in the kitchen, fused with cigarette smoke.
The treatments back in the ‘60s and 70s were rudimentary. One was a little plastic gizmo with a tiny propeller wheel in it; you placed a capsule of white powder in the machine, put it in your mouth, and took a breath, which set off the propeller, sending these little particles into my lungs. Most of it, of course, stuck on the roof and back of my mouth, and it tasted like talcum powder.
From time to time, I would simply panic, start to hyperventilate, and run into my parents’ bedroom, scared to death, and my dad would pick me up in his arms, hold me against his chest, pace back and forth, stroking my head in rhythmic circles. He told me to calm down — completely counter-intuitive when you feel your breath being literally taken away. But over time, I learned. I trained my mind to quiet itself, and my lungs to breathe more slowly.
The asthma improved a lot as I got older, but it returned in my thirties. My husband, Aaron, would be scared when my wheezing wouldn’t quit, and I’d have to stop everything and focus just on getting the next breath out; but by then, I took it all in stride. Humidity, mold, pollen and exercise were the triggers, which was one reason I always sucked at sports. Within a few minutes I’d be doubled over trying to catch my breath as the rugby ball hurtled toward me. Even now, as I type these words, I am attached to a nebulizer, which provides me with a mist of albuterol, to open up the bronchial passages. Maybe three times a year, I have to go on prednisone on top of my daily, preventative steroid inhalers. “Worst lungs in the practice!” my doctor joked recently. Every night, I use a CPAP machine to prevent my airways from clogging up — the same CPAP that President Biden has just adopted.
I mention all this not just because I’m in the middle of one of those lung episodes, but because I’ve just finished a 2020 book by James Nestor, called Breath. I wish I’d read it years ago. It’s a lively, if occasionally over-written book about the science of breathing, and also a history of breathing techniques pioneered by the Asian ancients who saw in the mastery of breathing the secret to a long and healthy life.
And one of the revelations in the book, at least to me, is that almost all human breathing difficulties are of relatively recent origin. Skulls of humans in the distant past “had enormous forward facing jaws … expansive sinus cavities and broad mouths … and they all had straight teeth.” Inhaling and exhaling was as easy for them as it is for most mammals. And have you ever seen an animal with bad teeth?
How did we evolve to have difficulty breathing? The same reason we are the only species whose females die in childbirth: our brains grew faster than our bodies could evolutionarily adapt, our noses grew forward to compensate for the loss, our larynxes descended as we communicated, and our mouths and jaws got smaller, reducing the size of our airways.
In due course, in the transition to farming and agriculture, we also simply chewed far less as we cooked and grilled food. Less chewing meant weaker, smaller jaws, and even smaller mouths. As agriculture grew more sophisticated in the last few centuries, and we stored and preserved more food, and food became softer, we chewed even less, and diseases of the airways took off. It turns out you need to exercise your mouth and your nose to keep them properly functional. Who knew?
Since we can’t reboot evolution, and we’re not going to chew raw meat every day anymore, the worst cases today require surgery, excavating the sinuses to create space in your nasal cavities for air to travel in and out. For most people, however, the best remedy is simple: routinely inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. It’s a division of labor between your two facial cavities — something that every child should be taught (and in some ancient cultures were). Yet we barely pay any attention to it.
No surprise then that asthma is now the most common chronic disease in the developed world, especially for children. The rate among Americans rose about 43 percent during the first two decades of the 21st century. Theories vary — from the overuse of antibiotics to the lack of Vitamin D to increased obesity to the “hygiene hypothesis” — that we’re too removed from natural immunities. Covid certainly didn’t help, and neither have all the wildfires in recent years. But increasingly I have comrades in the phlegm wars.
The first time I went to an ENT doctor and they did an x-ray, they found that my septum was chronically deviated (worse than 95 percent of people) and my passages crammed. I’ve had two surgeries since then — and they were hideous experiences. Both times led to chronic infections, worse breathing, asthma attacks. But a few months after the second one, my airways got clearer. Now I’m trying to exercise my nose regularly.
Meditation helps a lot; but I’ve recently tried something else I found out about in Nestor’s book: putting tape on my mouth when I go to sleep. It looks very Gitmo: a man with a duct tape on his face inside a CPAP mask. But I swear to God, it helped. By forcing your nose to do all the work, you start to train it to function properly.
The other key to improved breathing is also simple: do it slowly. How slowly? According to Nestor, precisely 5.5 times a minute. Observe yourself for a few minutes. We tend to breathe much more quickly than that. You don’t lose any oxygen by slow breathing; oxygen levels can actually rise by breathing less. Nestor then notes how slow breathing “goes by another name: prayer. When Buddhist monks chant their most popular mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, each spoken phrase lasts six seconds, with six seconds to inhale before the chant starts again.”
No surprise that this precise rhythm is the same as for reciting the Rosary, in yoga techniques, and in Japanese, Hawaiian, Native American, Buddhist, and Taoist prayer traditions. Breathe right and you connect with a deeper calm, a spiritual place, where your breath and the breath of God synchronize. The conversion of oxygen into carbon dioxide was the beginning of all life, a scientific fact that Genesis had already intuited: “then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
It’s the first, simplest act of our lives. It is the source of everything we know. I was forced to grapple with it because of asthma, but it’s as basic to our health as sleep and food. And in modernity, we have lost sight of it, evolved away from it, and now barely think about it at all. That tells us a lot about where we have gone astray as a civilization; and how each of us can make a difference in repairing it.
We need to learn, quite simply, how to breathe again. And practice it consciously, every day. Every minute. Five and a half times.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my reaction to the three big SCOTUS rulings this week; a conversation with Erick Erickson on how to save the GOP from the cult of Trump; reader dissents over my piece “Gay Rights and the Limits of Liberalism”; eight notable quotes from the week in news; 21 pieces we loved on Substack; a sweet serenade to a rescued cow for our Mental Health Break; a sunny window in Germany and a bicycle-packed one in the Netherlands; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a subscriber who is giving us a second look:
Your fine piece on gay rights and liberalism reminded me of your excellent book, which I taught in a course on Same Sex Marriage and the Law, and discussed in my book on the same subject. Hence, I decided to renew my lapsed subscription.
This next reader is still undecided:
Your latest column is as clear an untangling of the public muddle on this topic as I’ve seen anywhere, and one that systematically completes my own half-formed thoughts. It reminds me why I subscribed to the Dish. I let it lapse because I wasn’t faithful enough: some of the topics didn’t interest me, and your intransigence on others annoyed me (e.g. circumcision). But this column is what being a public intellectual is about, and it may inspire me to re-subscribe on general principle. But only “may” — I’m pretty stingy.
A Normal Court
The three big decisions this past week — and the reactions to them — are clarifying about where the Democratic Party now is.
(Read the rest of that piece here, for paid subscribers)
New On The Dishcast: Erick Erickson
Erick is a radio host and writer. He was an old-school blogger at RedState, serving as editor-in-chief, and he later became a political contributor for CNN and Fox News. Today he hosts the “Erick Erickson Show” on WSB Radio in Atlanta and runs a popular substack of the same name. He’s also in Reformed Theological Seminary working toward a PhD in theology, and he’s shown grace and integrity in the era of Trump.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on why evangelicals see Trump as a savior figure, and the severity of Trump’s looming case in Georgia. That link also takes you to commentary on our recent episodes with Tabia Lee on DEI and David Grann on dramatic shipwrecks. Readers also discuss gay rights and the limits of liberalism.
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“Once gay men and lesbians and trans people achieved legal and constitutional equality, the fight was over.” Some credulous women who didn’t want politicians making health decisions for them also thought their fight was over. They were wrong, as the Dobbs decision shows. Why should “gay men and lesbians and trans people” give up when it’s all so tenuous? I suspect that when their rights are trampled by the Alito court, you will be pooh-poohing the affected population and telling them to submit to the democratic process and leave these decisions to whims of state legislatures.
Read my response to that dissent and three more here. Follow more Dish discussion on the Notes site here (or the “Notes” tab in the Substack app).
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the affirmative-action ruling, the tumult in Russia, and the success of the US economy. Below are two examples, followed by a brand new substack:
Ross Barkan chronicles Mayor Adams’ descent into identity politics.
Weimar watch: “A serum for pixellated skin? A hair conditioner for a glitchy cartoon alien??”
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
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The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s a followup on last week’s contest:
I suspect a few readers will write you about this omission: Leonard Cohen. Cohen grew up in Westmount and also attended Westmount High School. Throughout his life, he maintained a connection to his Westmount synagogue, Shaar Hashomayim, which is the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in Canada. Cohen’s great-grandfather served as the synagogue’s president from 1896-1901 and 1907-1914. His final album, You Want it Darker, featured the choir and cantor from the synagogue.
Most famously, his song “Suzanne” is filled with references to Montreal. For example, this is the “lady of the harbor” he sings about:
The Suzanne of the song is Suzanne Verdal, a dancer who was married to a Montreal sculptor Armand Vaillancourt. According to Verdal, she and Cohen drank a lot of tea and ate mandarin oranges while taking in the view of the St. Lawrence River during the summer of 1965. While Cohen was famous for being a lady’s man, Verdal insisted they were just friends.
