The Science of Functional Breathing

Patrick McKeown and James Nestor finally sat down together in person.

McKeown has spent twenty-five years teaching breathing, first to people with asthma, then to people with sleep problems, then to people with anxiety and panic disorder. He worked with roughly six hundred clients a year while doing it. Nestor is the journalist who wrote Breath, the book that put this subject in front of millions of readers who would never have picked up a book about breathing.

On paper they belong to different camps. Nestor came to this through intensity: a Sudarshan Kriya class that left him soaked in sweat and unable to explain what had just happened to his body. McKeown came to it through the opposite door, a nose-unblocking exercise that worked, followed by the strange, quiet discovery that breathing less air made his hands warm and his mind stop churning.

If you follow this field at all, you have probably seen those two positions treated as a fight. The conversation is far more interesting than that, and the most useful thing in it is not a technique. It is the moment Nestor points out that he and McKeown overlap by roughly ninety-five percent, and that the remaining five percent is personal preference rather than principle.

I want to walk through what they agreed on, because that agreement is more or less the foundation the Pranadan Method is built on, and then add a few things from my own practice where I think the conversation left something on the table.

Key takeaways

The two best-known voices in breathing agree on almost everything that matters, and disagree mainly about entry points
Nasal breathing alone is roughly seventy percent of breathing well, according to Nestor
Night breathing is the highest-return work available, because it costs no time and no willpower
Air hunger when you switch to the nose is usually CO2 sensitivity, not a blocked nose, and it recalibrates
Chronic mouth breathing is an oral health problem as much as a respiratory one, and most dentists are not raising it
There is a simple sequence of tests to work out whether a child’s mouth breathing is habit, rhinitis or adenoids
Mouth taping is defensible when built slowly, and dangerous when rushed with untreated sleep apnoea
Building resilience without protecting your boundaries just raises your tolerance for a life that is still costing you

The processed food analogy

Nestor reaches for nutrition to explain the point. Argue carnivore against vegan and you will be there all night, but both camps agree that processed food is bad, and simply removing it gets you eighty percent of the way to eating well. The remaining twenty percent matters, but it is the smaller part of the problem.

Breathing works the same way. Whatever school someone trained in, the shared ground looks like this:

Breathe through your nose, in and out, all day
Breathe through your nose all night, without exception
Breathe slowly and low, with a soft belly and a diaphragm you can feel move
Let the tongue rest against the roof of the mouth

That is it. That is the part everyone agrees on, and it is the part almost nobody does.

McKeown makes a related point that I wish were better known, because it takes the mystique out of the whole field. There are only so many things you can do with a breath. You can breathe faster or slower. Fuller or lighter. You can hold the breath briefly or for longer, at the top of the inhale or the bottom of the exhale. You can breathe through the nose or the mouth, into the chest or the diaphragm. That is the entire set. Every breathing exercise that has ever been taught, in any tradition, is a combination of those variables.

Which means designing a practice is not mystical. It is a matter of asking what a given combination does to carbon dioxide, to blood flow, to oxygen delivery and to the vagus nerve, and whether that is the right thing for this particular person, at their age, with their current breathing pattern.

From my own practice. This is exactly why the first pillar of the Pranadan Method is Regulate rather than anything more exotic. People arrive wanting a technique, ideally one with a name and a number attached. What actually changes their week is fixing the route and the rhythm of their ordinary, unremarkable, twenty thousand breaths a day. The practice session is important. The other twenty-three hours are more important.

Why nobody told you any of this

This is the question Nestor keeps returning to, and it is personal for him. He had teeth extracted, wore headgear and braces for years, watched his teeth grow crooked anyway, and went back into braces a second time. Nobody, at any point, mentioned how he was breathing.

Between them, they offer four reasons.

It got coded as fringe. Better breathing became associated with crystals and robes, despite being the most basic biological function there is
Clinical time. A doctor seeing fifteen patients an hour has time to stop you deteriorating, not to teach you how to live better
Incuriosity. Practitioners repeat what they were taught and dismiss what they were not, which both men point out is the opposite of scientific thinking
The breathing field’s own marketing. Both agree the industry has damaged itself. McKeown will not use the term breath work at all, preferring breathing training or breathing re-education

The resistance was not theoretical. McKeown describes attending an asthma conference in Ireland in 2005, three years into teaching, where the chief executive of the organisation sat down beside him specifically to tell him not to ask any questions. At a medical conference in Chicago, a professor of medicine stood up and stated that it makes no difference whether you breathe through your nose or your mouth. McKeown was the only breathing teacher in a room of several hundred physicians. Dr Kevin Boyd stood up from the audience and backed him.

Nestor’s counter to that professor is evolutionary. The sinus passages take up an enormous amount of extremely expensive real estate inside a skull that also has to house a brain, two eyes, and a mouth. Evolution does not spend that much space on nothing. He puts the dismissal in the same category as the historical treatment of tonsils, adenoids, the appendix and the spleen as spare parts.

A note on how to judge who to trust

There is a thread running through this conversation worth extracting, because it is a useful filter for any health information you encounter.

Nestor has revised Breath roughly a dozen times across editions, most substantially for the paperback that came out in January. Doctors told him certain passages were unclear, he agreed, and he rewrote them. He is careful to say nothing was factually wrong, since the book was heavily fact-checked, but that the phrasing was not as clear as it should have been. His view is that publicly revising a claim is a position of honesty rather than weakness, and that a field where nobody ever admits error is a field where nothing progresses.

He applies the same standard to his own research. His original book proposal turned out to be wrong. He had understood the loss of functional breathing as a problem three layers deep, discovered it was closer to ten, and rewrote the entire book, losing about two years of work and travel costs. His conclusion is that you cannot assemble this kind of understanding from search results, and that AI will not do it for you either. You have to go and talk to people for years.

From my own practice. I would treat this as a practical test. When you are deciding whether to trust a breathing teacher, look for whether they have ever changed their mind in public. This field is full of people defending a position mainly because it is theirs. The ones worth learning from will tell you which part of what they taught five years ago they no longer teach.

Why the nose is seventy percent of the job

Nestor puts a number on it. If breathing well is the whole task, nasal breathing alone is about seventy percent of it. His reasoning is elegant: once you are breathing through your nose, you are naturally inclined toward slower, fuller, quieter breaths. The nose does much of the regulating for you. Fix the route and the rhythm partly fixes itself.

His instruction to newcomers is blunt. Get the nose sorted, then come back. People constantly ask to skip ahead to the more interesting material, and the answer is no.

McKeown adds the piece that most people need to hear before they give up. When you switch from mouth to nose, you often feel air hunger, and it is easy to assume your nose is blocked. Sometimes it is. But often the hunger has nothing to do with anatomy. If you have been over-breathing for years, your body has become highly sensitive to carbon dioxide, and it will demand more air than it needs. That sensitivity recalibrates. The discomfort is a stage, not a verdict.

From my own practice. Worth adding what the nose is actually doing while it does this. It filters, warms and humidifies the air. It adds resistance, which slows the breath without you deciding to slow it. And the nasal passages and sinuses produce nitric oxide, which travels down with the inhale and helps open the airways and improve the match between airflow and blood flow in the lungs. Breathe through your mouth and you bypass all of it.

What mouth breathing does to your mouth

This is one of the longest stretches of the conversation, and it is the part I suspect will be new to most people, because it has nothing to do with lungs.

The mechanism is unglamorous. You lose a lot of moisture through the mouth every time you exhale through it. Do that persistently and saliva cannot be replaced fast enough, so the mouth dries out. A dry mouth is a different environment: the bacterial population shifts, the oral microbiome changes, and the risk of decay and gum disease goes up.

McKeown had been preparing a presentation for a group of dentists in Boston, which forced him into a deep dive on the evidence, and he describes coming out of it genuinely unable to understand how the profession has missed this. Every dental hygienist in the western world discusses brushing, flossing and sugar. Almost none of them ask about breathing. He credits airway-focused dentists as the exception, naming Dr Stacey Whitman among them, and estimates that around ninety-five percent of the profession has not incorporated it.

Nestor’s contribution here is quietly devastating. He has a dental paper from around 1890 making exactly the same argument: mouth breathing combined with dietary carbohydrate creates ideal conditions for the bacteria that cause cavities. This is not a new discovery being resisted. It is an old one that was dropped.

The uncomfortable incentive question

Nestor raises the cynical reading explicitly, and is careful to say it is not his own view. A practice whose income depends on repeat treatment has no obvious commercial reason to teach patients how to stop needing it. Teaching a child to breathe through the nose, rest the tongue on the palate and swallow properly, so that their teeth come in straighter, reduces future work.

His counter-example is the practitioner who has built a reputation on the opposite model. He points to Miguel Stanley at the White Clinic, whose approach treats the whole body rather than the mouth in isolation, and who tries to make it so patients do not have to keep coming back to have cavities filled. Nestor’s argument is that this is the better business as well as the better ethics, because it produces a dedicated following rather than a transaction.

His reception at dental conferences is split down the middle. Half the room nods along. The other half are openly angry and tell him so afterwards, asking what right he has to come in and spread rumours. He responds by offering to sit down with the data any time they like, in a friendly conversation where he might learn something too. He reports that in years of making that offer, not one person has ever taken him up on it.

Where it goes from there

McKeown extends the chain further. The oral microbiome does not stay in the mouth. Gastric acid does not neutralise all of it, so it translocates to the gut. And P. gingivalis, a bacterium associated with gum disease, has been detected in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. He is careful not to overclaim a mechanism, and neither will I, but the direction of the research is not comfortable reading for anyone who sleeps with their mouth open.

There is also a measurement problem that McKeown thinks has held the whole field back. There is no agreed clinical definition of mouth breathing. You cannot easily quantify it, which makes it hard to study and easy to dismiss. Nestor’s response is practical: it may be hard to assess in yourself, but it is obvious in other people, and it is completely obvious in your own children.

From my own practice. Here is the piece I would add, because it is the strongest argument for tongue posture and it went unstated. The tongue is a muscle that, resting against the palate, applies gentle continuous pressure to the roof of the mouth. The roof of the mouth is also the floor of the nasal cavity. In a growing child, that pressure is part of what shapes the upper jaw wide and forward, which produces room for teeth and a wider airway. A child who mouth breathes cannot rest the tongue there, because the tongue has to drop to let air through. The jaw develops narrower, the airway develops narrower, and the consequences last for life. This is why Nestor talks about how a face is going to grow, and it is why the childhood window matters so much more than the adult one.

If your child breathes through their mouth

This section of the conversation is the most immediately actionable thing in it.

A parent noticing that a child breathes through their mouth has three possible causes to distinguish between, and often a combination of them: allergic rhinitis, enlarged adenoids, or simple habit. McKeown uses a sequence of checks to work out which.

Close the mouth and observe. If the child is immediately comfortable breathing through the nose with the mouth closed, the mouth breathing is habitual rather than obstructive
Try the nose unblocking exercise, six times. Breath holding has been known since 1923 to reduce nasal resistance and increase nasal volume. If the nose clears noticeably after six repetitions, rhinitis is a significant contributor, because this would not resolve enlarged adenoids that quickly
Three minutes sitting, mouth closed. Can the child do it comfortably
The steps exercise. Breathe out, hold the nose gently, and walk. Start at ten paces and build to fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Uncomfortable at the end, never maximal, never extreme
Walk, then jog, with the mouth closed. This is the threshold McKeown gives to any uncertain parent. If a child can jog with their mouth closed, that child’s nose is working perfectly well

Nestor’s framing of the responsibility here is the part I keep thinking about. He does not believe it is a dentist’s job to teach anyone how to breathe. He does believe it is any adult’s job to say something simple and quick to a parent whose child is heading for avoidable damage: your son is a chronic mouth breather, it will affect how his face grows and his oral and respiratory health, here is somewhere to read about it. A sentence and thirty seconds. That is all he is asking for, and it is not happening.

From my own practice. Two cautions, because this is where enthusiasm does damage. Do not tape a child’s mouth at night. Nestor is explicit about the position that puts a parent in, and a lip support that closes gently while still allowing air out is a different proposition from a seal. And do not push. Every one of the checks above is an assessment, not a training drill. If a child is distressed, you have your answer, and it is time to see someone: an ear nose and throat specialist, or an airway-focused dentist.

Sleep is where this matters most

Both men land on sleep as the highest-leverage place to work, and their reasons are practical rather than theoretical.

Sleep is observable. You may not be able to tell whether you are a mouth breather during the day, but your partner can hear you at night, and any parent can hear a child snoring through a wall. Sleep also produces the fastest felt benefit, which matters enormously for anyone who needs early evidence to keep going. And it carries over: what your body does for eight hours at night becomes the pattern it defaults to during the day.

McKeown makes the same point from the other direction. You can teach someone beautifully over a weekend retreat, and if they sleep with an open mouth that night, much of the work goes out the window.

The mechanics, which are worth understanding

When the mouth falls open in sleep, the jaw drops back and the tongue sits lower in the throat. The airway narrows. Airflow becomes turbulent, which is snoring, and in some people the airway collapses, which is apnoea.

There is also a lung volume effect that gets discussed far too rarely. We are taught to think of the upper airway and the lower airway as two separate things, when functionally they are one system. Mouth breathing tends to be shallow and upper chest driven, which reduces lung volume, and lower lung volume makes the throat more collapsible. Recruiting the diaphragm raises lung volume and stabilises the airway from below. Fast, forceful breathing also increases negative pressure on the inhale, which pulls the airway walls inward. So the slow part and the low part are not decoration. They are structural.

Nestor’s own history is a good diagnostic if you recognise yourself in it. He used to go to bed with a pint of water beside him and wake repeatedly through the night to drink, mouth dry every time. Around half to sixty percent of people wake with a dry mouth. That is not a hydration problem.

Scale matters here too. A Lancet review put the estimated global figure for obstructive sleep apnoea at 936 million people.

From my own practice. This is the whole argument for Restore sitting immediately beside Regulate in the Pranadan pillars rather than three chapters later. For a busy professional running on empty, night breathing is the highest return work available, because it requires no willpower, no time, and no scheduling. You are already lying there for seven hours. The only question is which route the air takes.

The tape argument, and what actually gets confused

Mouth taping is the most contested thing Nestor has written about. He gets angry letters. People stand up at sleep medicine conferences to tell him he is one hundred percent wrong, and that sleeping with a closed mouth is dangerous for anyone with apnoea.

His position turns out to be far more careful than the internet version of it. Buying duct tape, sealing your mouth, and expecting your severe untreated apnoea to disappear would be a catastrophe, and he has never suggested it. What he describes is a slow ladder: nasal breathing for five minutes, then tape for ten minutes at your desk, then twenty, then a short nap, then a few weeks of daytime nasal breathing while you walk and work and wash the dishes, and only then a few hours at night. If it is uncomfortable at any point, take it off.

He also rejects the halfway objection, the one that concedes nasal breathing might reduce snoring but insists apnoea is a different mechanism entirely. His evidence is correspondence from people who have sent him their numbers: apnoea and hypopnoea indexes halved, cut by three quarters, and in some cases resolved, from switching to nasal breathing.

McKeown adds the distinction that most of this argument is actually about, and it is one you rarely see spelled out.

	Mouth leak	Mouth puffing
What happens	CPAP air enters the nose and escapes through the mouth	Pressure builds and cannot exit through the nose fast enough, so it vents through the lips
Who it affects	Roughly a quarter of CPAP users	Around half of people with severe sleep apnoea
Why it matters	The airway is never properly splinted open, and people abandon the machine	It is the legitimate clinical concern behind objections to taping
Recognised since	The mid-1980s	Far less discussed, and not identifiable by looking at someone

The mouth leak story is worth knowing if you or your partner uses a machine. CPAP was designed by the Australian physician Colin Sullivan, and his early prototypes used a nasal mask, with air travelling in through the nose and down the throat to splint the airway open. When people leak air out through the mouth, the standard response is to switch them to a full face mask. But a full face mask permits an open mouth, which means a low tongue and a jaw set back, which narrows the airway, which means the pressure has to be cranked up to fight against it, which is exactly what people cannot tolerate. McKeown’s position is that addressing the mouth would keep more people on their machines.

Mouth puffing is the argument for a support that holds the lips gently together while still allowing air to escape if it must, rather than an occlusive seal. Both men land on the same governing principle, which is common sense. If it is uncomfortable, stop. Nestor removes most of the adhesive before he applies anything, so it lifts off the moment he opens his mouth. He also has no affiliation with any tape brand and has turned down the offers, on the grounds that the right answer depends on what the individual is comfortable with.

There is also a clean piece of logic in here about snoring. Mouth snoring comes from the soft palate and is throaty, and you cannot snore through a mouth you are not breathing through, so closing the mouth eliminates it entirely. Nasal snoring is a separate phenomenon shaped by anatomy: deviated septum, chronic rhinitis, obstruction. Softening and slowing the breath reduces the turbulence and helps, but it will not always resolve it.

From my own practice. If you have diagnosed or suspected sleep apnoea, this is a conversation to have with a doctor before you tape anything. If you use a CPAP, keep using it. Nestor is emphatic that these machines save lives, and equally emphatic that they manage the symptom rather than the cause. Everything in this article sits underneath the machine, not instead of it.

Carbon dioxide, the gas everyone gets backwards

This was the section of Breath that Nestor was most careful with, vetted by several doctors, a biochemist and a chemist, because it inverts what most people assume. Breathe more, get more oxygen, feel better. It does not work that way.

The chemistry is old. The Bohr effect dates to 1904 and the oxygen dissociation curve is in every respiratory physiology textbook. Carbon dioxide is what persuades haemoglobin to release oxygen into your tissues. Blow off too much CO2 through chronic over-breathing and you carry plenty of oxygen in your blood while delivering less of it where it is needed. You also constrict blood vessels, including those feeding the brain.

McKeown’s exam story from 1997 is the best illustration of this I have heard. Already stressed, already a chronic mouth breather, he read a book that told him to take full deep breaths before an important university exam. He took them for two minutes, walked into the hall, and spent the next fifteen minutes disoriented and spaced out.

The newer material is more interesting. There is a growing body of work on intermittent hypercapnia, deliberately allowing carbon dioxide to rise. Rising CO2 dilates cerebral blood vessels, which increases blood flow and pushes cerebrospinal fluid out. When breathing normalises, the vessels narrow and the fluid returns. That movement in and out appears to help clear metabolic waste, including the amyloid beta implicated in Alzheimer’s. Nestor notes the historical irony: similar CO2 therapy was in use at leading institutions a century ago before it was quietly buried, and he has since found a six hundred page account of how that happened.

This is where the two men politely disagree. Nestor has watched people try inhaled CO2 devices and have their minds changed in one session. McKeown’s response is direct: why not just breathe less air? A breath hold does the same thing, costs nothing, and is available in an airport queue.

From my own practice. I am with McKeown on the practical question, though I understand Nestor’s point about doorways. But I would add a caution neither of them made explicitly. The reason Pranadan Breathing uses equal-length nasal breathing without retention is that the CO2 effect does not require a breath hold to be useful. Slowing the breath and softening the volume raises carbon dioxide gently and continuously, without the strain that makes people brace, and without the jolt that some anxious people find deeply unpleasant. If you have a history of panic, a long hold is often the wrong first tool. A quiet, even, slightly slower breath is almost always the right one.

The claim that gets him the most abuse

There is a passage in Breath about Katharina Schroth, a woman with severe scoliosis who used asymmetric breathing and posture work to straighten her own spine, and who went on to teach the method to thousands of women who had been told by hospitals to go home and stay in bed.

Nestor still gets abuse for including it, and he finds this baffling, because the school still exists, the papers are in the back of his book, and there are photographs and video. He describes researchers telling him that whoever gave him that information was wrong, confirming they had seen the evidence, and continuing to call it impossible. He is careful about his own wording: he does not claim scoliosis is cured, he claims a spine can be straightened through breathing and postural work.

He also relays a hypothesis he got from Andrew Weil, who got it from his own mentor. We still do not know what causes most scoliosis. The suggestion was that poor breathing and poor posture during the fast growth years, with one lung consistently inflating more than the other, could shape how the spine grows. It is not provable, since you cannot run that experiment on children, but Nestor finds it intuitively persuasive, and so do I.

McKeown adds the structural link that makes it plausible: the diaphragm is a stabiliser of the spine as well as a breathing muscle. Functional breathing and functional movement are not separate subjects.

Two roads to the same place

The most valuable few minutes of the conversation are when they trace how each of them arrived here.

Nestor needed the volume turned up to eleven. He needed something that blew his mind before he could believe there was anything underneath it. McKeown needed the opposite: after twenty-six years of living in his head, he needed the felt experience of being centred and calm to know that something real had happened. What he reports getting from it, more than anything, is roughly a thirty percent reduction in the churn of his own thinking.

Nestor’s conclusion is generous and, I think, correct. Whichever door you come through, you need a moment where the light goes on. After that, the work is the same for everyone.

He also describes what he actually does, and it is refreshingly unglamorous. There is no secret routine. His life is busy and stressed and full of airports. The thing breathing has done for him is not a practice, it is a set of habits that eventually stopped requiring attention. A few months of deliberate work, and then his body simply adapts to the situation without being told. He still intervenes consciously when he needs to, and what he uses is a four-count in and a four-count out through the nose while standing in a queue.

From my own practice. That last detail deserves more attention than it got. The most travelled, most experienced, most technique-literate person in this conversation regulates himself with equal-length nasal breathing. Not a proprietary ratio. Not a hold. In and out, even, through the nose. This is precisely what I mean by smoothness before slowness. Get the breath even and quiet first, and let the slowness arrive on its own over weeks. A person who forces a long ratio before the breath is smooth is just doing effortful breathing with better branding.

The part that has nothing to do with breathing

Late in the conversation, McKeown asks a question that I suspect will land harder for most readers of this blog than anything about tape or carbon dioxide.

If you have tools that build resilience, does that let you take on too much?

Nestor’s answer is yes, without hesitation. He could not do what he does without these techniques. He also acknowledges that the extra capacity is precisely what allowed him to say yes to everything for six years straight. His own summary: the first four years were fine, the fifth was marginal, the sixth was too much. He is now trying to learn to say no. What he wants is not less work but less noise, and to be left alone to do deeper work. He mentions the residual tension of parallel unfinished projects, the way nine incomplete things sit in the background while you try to work on the tenth.

There is a second admission alongside it that I found more striking. He is finished with cheerleading. His inbox holds thousands of messages from people asking him to motivate them, and his conclusion is that everything they need is already free, in books, on podcasts, on YouTube, and now from AI. What none of those can supply is the willingness to get up and do it. He compares it to nutrition, where we know how to lose weight and reverse type two diabetes, and hardly anyone does. So he has stopped spending his energy on persuasion and started spending it on people already willing to give it ten minutes a day.

From my own practice. This is the trap the Pranadan Method is designed around, and it is why I have never been comfortable positioning breathing as a performance tool. If you use these practices to expand your capacity, and you fill every inch of that new capacity with more obligation, you have not recovered anything. You have simply raised your tolerance for a life that is still costing you. Regulate exists to give you a floor, not a ceiling. The point of a calmer nervous system is not to survive more. It is to need less surviving.

What happens next, and why it will not come from schools

Nestor is making a three-part documentary series, and his reasoning for it is an admission of the limits of writing. He wrote the book, appended a section telling people exactly what to do, and did years of podcasts. People still walk up to him and ask how to reduce asthma symptoms or what to do about a child’s sleep apnoea. Many people do not read books, or read them superficially, and most are visual learners.

So the structure is deliberate. Three episodes of roughly forty minutes carrying the story and the why, each followed by instructional modules taught by leaders in the field, which contain no story at all. The story was already told. The modules just show you what to do. The working plan organises them by problem rather than technique: children and mouth breathing, sleep disordered breathing and snoring and apnoea, mental health.

It will be free everywhere, funded by voluntary contribution, with an ambition of twenty languages. Not behind a streaming paywall, explicitly so that a child with asthma in a country that cannot pay can still watch it. He has taken loans to make it, openly admits he has no idea whether the model will work, and says that if it fails, it is the last thing he will do in breathing. Filming is in October and November, aiming for release in spring 2027.

The conversation closes on schools. McKeown wants one class a week: breathing, attention, learning to tell a useful thought from an unuseful one, self-regulation, sleep. He argues from personal experience. He left school at fourteen, went back a year later, and remembers sitting there looking at the teacher while his attention was stuck somewhere inside his own head. His position is that a child will not reach their potential on poor sleep, poor breathing and a poor state of mind, that the difficulty extends to everyone around that child, and that it does not end with childhood.

Nestor says it will never happen. He points at what is served in American school canteens as evidence of how much institutions prioritise children’s biology, and adds that the same argument applies to teaching them how to eat and how to exercise. His closing observation, which he makes twice, is that McKeown keeps applying pure logic to systems that do not run on logic, whether that is a dismissive professor or a school district. His own education, he notes, largely consisted of memorising state capitals.

From my own practice. I want McKeown to be right and I suspect Nestor is right. Which leaves the same conclusion either way: this arrives through families and individuals, one household at a time, and waiting for an institution to teach your child to breathe is a bet with a very long settlement date.

What to do this week

Nothing here requires a course, an app, or a device. In the order both men would give it:

Close your mouth during the day. Walking, working, cooking, on the phone. That is the seventy percent
Let the tongue rest on the palate. Notice where it is right now. Notice where it is when you swallow, and whether anything in your face moves while you do it
Test the nose properly before you conclude it is blocked. If nasal breathing feels hard, do a nose unblocking exercise a few times, then sit quietly for three minutes with the mouth closed, then walk. If you can walk comfortably nose-only, your nose works
Work on the night. Once daytime nasal breathing is comfortable, try it for a fifteen minute nap. Then a couple of hours. Build slowly, and stop if it is uncomfortable
Listen to your children. If they snore, sleep with the mouth open, or wake with a dry mouth, that is worth acting on now rather than at thirty
When you need to settle, breathe evenly through the nose. Equal in, equal out, soft enough that nobody standing beside you would notice. Slow it only when it stays smooth

If you want the full picture of why all of this works, read Breath and The Oxygen Advantage. Both men, to their credit, spend most of this interview pointing away from themselves and toward the thing that actually matters, which is whether you get up and do it.

Source: Patrick McKeown in conversation with James Nestor, published on McKeown’s podcast. Their previous conversation was six years earlier, and was the first interview Nestor gave for Breath.

Written by Danail Donchev, a breathwork and pranayama teacher. Last reviewed: September 2026.

Medical disclaimer: This article is educational and is not medical advice. If you have diagnosed or suspected sleep apnoea, a respiratory condition, or a history of panic disorder, speak with a qualified health professional before changing how you breathe at night. If you use a CPAP machine, keep using it. Nothing here is a substitute for dental or medical assessment, particularly for a child.