Silence. I lost my headphones. I left them in a MILES car on my way to an important meeting, and my flatmate, who gave them to me as a gift, doesn't know about it yet.
The AirPods with a heart on the white case had been my constant companion until then: on the bus, on the train, on walks, or during lunch breaks.
I had never noticed how often I shut myself off from the outside world to listen to songs on repeat. What I didn’t expect was that the loss, and the dull “silence” it left behind, would lead me to breathe less, to become more aware of my heartbeat and to pay more attention to breathing through my nose. Whether I have been taking exactly 13,500 breaths a day ever since, though, I can’t say for sure :)
Nestor’s genuine account of his breathing research made me enjoy incorporating some of the breathing experiments he had collected into my daily life until they became routine. On my 45-minute commute to the UKE, for example, I began practising inhaling and exhaling for 5.5 seconds each, usually from the stop “Carl-Petersen-Straße” to “U Mundsburg”, roughly ten minutes. After a short while, I noticed a pleasant sense of calm and realised that I could influence my autonomic nervous system. Because this exercise is so easy to fit into everyday life, I also shared it with my workshop group, explaining that breathing less often and exhaling a smaller volume of air was key to good breathing and the health benefits that come with it. The mothers told me it was enormously helpful for finding a brief moment to themselves amid the hustle and bustle of everyday life with children.
Eventually, Nestor’s words also found their way into my swimming training. Having tried several times before without success, I set myself the goal of increasing the number of arm strokes between breaths. At first I settled for one, breathing on every left or right stroke. This way I could swim front crawl for 40 minutes without any trouble. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long to adjust my rhythm so that I could consistently take three strokes between breaths. Without pushing past my limits, I varied the number of strokes, sometimes five, sometimes seven, before taking a deep breath and returning to my three-stroke rhythm. As I had once memorised for my PE exam at school, this noticeably increased my VO2max, the measure of my cardiorespiratory fitness. After a while, I found the same silence I had come to know without headphones with my head under water in the pool. The monotony of the pool floor slowly but steadily passing beneath me and the rushing sound of the water were ideal for focusing consciously on my breath. Apart from a few “competitors” crossing my lane, nothing disturbed my calm.
On every visit to the pool, I also practised swimming 25 metres underwater, and here too I was surprised at how quickly the training paid off.
James Nestor’s book will stay with me for a while yet. Just as I have explored selected topics in more depth, I will continue to explore the others when the opportunity arises. A very good book!
Nestor, J. (2020). Breath: The new science of a lost art. Riverhead Books.
