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She tells a respiratory version of The Fall; humans used to breathe correctly. When a three-year-old breathes, their tummy goes in and out. Same with animals. But at a certain point we started breathing “verticallyâ€. That’s how we’re designed to breathe when we face genuinely stressful situations – but not, say, when our phone pings 150 times a day. The way she describes it, we have been hit by a “perfect stormâ€; not only are we much more sedentary, we’re also constantly responding to digital technology, a respiratory disaster. “When you’re looking at these screens, your breathing changes. You’re like an animal in stalking mode. And, if you notice, you’re spending all day taking incredibly small breaths. The only time you’re really breathing is when you take a big, expansive sigh.†Breathing properly, she maintains, is the single most important intervention you can make for your own health. Cheap, too.
Breathing is automatic and not automatic at the same time. Respiratory function is controlled in the brain stem, the part of the brain that controls the basic things that keep us alive, like a heartbeat. You still breathe when you’re unconscious, asleep or anaesthetised. But, in some ways, it’s closer to somatic functions (such as walking) than autonomic, involuntary functions (such as sweating). You don’t have to think about each step you take, you just head somewhere. Your brain automatically adjusts your steps, just as your brain will occasionally insert a sigh when it needs more oxygen. But you can also decide to hold your breath, hyperventilate or, as the more out-there breathwork practitioners promise, use your breath “to journey between the conscious and unconscious mindâ€.
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I later discovered that his teachings are a loosely modified version of Wim Hof’s patented Method (known as WHM), which has gained a cult following among bodybuilders, athletes and celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey and Orlando Bloom. Hof is also known as the Ice Man, which comes from his penchant for encasing himself in ice, swimming under bits of the Arctic and climbing up mountains in shorts. (He made it up Kilimanjaro, but didn’t quite manage Everest.) He holds 26 world records for withstanding extreme temperatures, partly thanks to his breathing technique, and runs retreats in Holland, Poland and Spain; he also sells online courses, while giving away the basics free in his app.
“The autonomic nervous system! The endocrine system! The lymphatic system! The immune system! The vascular system!†he declaims when I Skype him in Holland. “According to science, humans couldn’t actively influence any of these. But we have shown that you can tap into them.†Just by breathing? “Yes! That’s why we made a T-shirt that says: ‘BREATHE MOTHERFUCKER!’†He bursts out laughing. “It’s so good, because it’s so simple!â€
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His thesis is that modern humans live in a comfort zone that’s slowly killing us (and also making us fat: you burn many more calories in the cold). Our ancestors used to be fine mooching around the tundra in loincloths. But as humans have learned to control our environments – with central heating, insulation, coats and so on – we are losing our ability to respond to nature.
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And there is some evidence that he may be on to something. The American author Scott Carney set out to debunk Hof’s methods for his 2017 book What Doesn’t Kill Us, but ended up broadly convinced. The most credible evidence came in 2014, when a team of researchers at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands studied 12 subjects who had followed the Wim Hof Method and found they had an increased ability to resist infection and fight inflammation. The researchers concluded that this had “important implications†for the treatment of diseases that involve excessive inflammation, especially autoimmune diseases
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