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There is nothing more essential to our health and wellbeing than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. In Breath, journalist James Nestor travels the world to discover the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

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, allergies, 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 ancient wisdom and 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.

James Nestor is an author and journalist who has written for Scientific American, Outside Magazine, BBC, The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Public Radio, The San Francisco Chronicle, Surfer’s Journal, and more. He was awarded the prize for Best General Nonfiction Book of 2020 by the American Society of Journalists and Authors and was a Finalist for the Royal Society Best Science Book of 2020 for his latest publication, Breath. 

Additionally, in 2017 he started working with National Geographic Explorer and marine scientist, David Gruber, to research and try to understand cetacean communication. Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a nonprofit research group that develops and employs technologies such as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence in the hopes of one day cracking interspecies communication, was launched years later.

James Nestor