James Nestor Interview

Author profile photographs, book covers, and biographies are available at tinyurl.com/mk6vp22g

You did a lot of research into how humans became such frequent mouthbreathers—what were some of the most surprising things you learned?

That humans are the worst breathers in the animal kingdom, and that this affliction is so new in our evolution. Our ancient ancestors shared in universally straight teeth, powerful jaws, wide nasal apertures, and much more expansive airways. And yet so many of today have some form of airway obstruction. We’ve become a culture of snorers, chokers, wheezers, coughers, panters, and generally miserable breathers. How did this happen? What caused it? And can it be fixed? These are the questions that inspired me to spend so many years digging through ancient burial sites, medical libraries, ancient scripts, dental records, and more. It was all so hard to believe when I first discovered it, but the proof is all over the place.

What are the health consequences of breathing through the mouth frequently?

You lose 40 percent more humidity when breathing through the mouth, so mouthbreathing can more easily dehydrate the body. Inhaling and exhaling breathing through this channel will also disrupt the pH balance in the mouth and makes the teeth more prone to cavities and the oral cavity more prone to periodontal disease. The mouth plays very little role in filtering or conditioning air, which means that when we breathe through it, we are exposing our lungs and airways to everything in the environment. If you live in a city like I do that means pollution, pollens, dust, toxins, and more. The lack of resistance breathing while breathing through the mouth makes it much easier for us to breathe too much and high into the chest. This makes it harder for our bodies to efficiently use oxygen and also triggers a stress response in our nervous system. In various studies, researchers have found that breathing through the mouth affects the brain, disturbing the functioning of areas (mostly the frontal cortex) associated with decision making and logic. I could go on.

The ancients knew about the dangers of mouthbreathing and wrote about it over thousands of years. Around 1500 bce, the Ebers Papyrus, one of the oldest medical texts ever discovered, offered a description of how nostrils were supposed to feed air to the heart and lungs, not the mouth. A thousand years later, Genesis 2:7 described how “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” A Chinese Taoist text from the eighth century AD noted that the nose was the “heavenly door,” and that breath must be taken in through it. “Never do otherwise,” the text warned, “for breath would be in danger and illness would set in.” 

Western scientists have been saying much of the same for more than one hundred years; they’ve proven the deleterious effects of mouthbreathing in numerous studies. Few would ever contest any of these claims; but few of us in the public ever got the message. 

Briefly, what was your own breath journey that led you to writing this book? How did your previous book help you in this line of research?

For years I was eating the right foods, exercising all the time, sleeping eight hours, but I kept getting sick, most often with respiratory problems. I’d had frequent bouts of bronchitis and mild pneumonia year in and year out. My doctor would prescribe me antibiotics and told me I was fine. I suspected something else was going on, but I didn’t know what. 

Then, several years ago, I was sent on a reporting assignment for Outside magazine to cover the World Freediving Championship in Greece. I watched athletes take a single breath of air and plummet to below 100 meters -- no fins, no air tanks, just their natural bodies. They’d come back to the surface four minutes later. It absolutely shocked me. The freedivers told me that learning the “art of breathing” not only enabled them – or any of us -- to dive to incredible depths, but breathing could also be used to heat our bodies up, even heal us of chronic ailments. As a science journalist, I assumed these stories were fabricated or, at least, gross exaggerations. I got home to San Francisco and spent several months researching their claims: talking to experts in the field, reading over scientific studies, interviewing other super breathers. I discovered these incredible stories were scientifically validated. Somehow, in some way, by controlling our breathing we could do all these things. And it was available to anyone, everywhere. 

Can you share some tips for proper breathing (getting enough quality breath, decreasing mouthbreathing, etc.), particularly for beginners? 

Breathe through your nose. Do this as often as you can: night and day and especially while sleeping. Inhale and exhale through your nose. If your nose is congested, you need to find a way of clearing it. Dr. Jayakar Nayak, the Chief of Rhinologogy Research at Stanford University, told me that if a sink is clogged in our house, we unplug it as soon as possible. The nose needs to be considered similarly. 

To be clear, breathing through your mouth on occasion -- laughing, sighing, talking -- is completely normal. Don’t get too stressed about it. What I’m talking about here is habitual breathing. I’m convinced nobody can ever be truly healthy as a chronic mouthbreather. So do everything you can to train yourself to breathe through your nose. The nose not only filters and conditions air, it also slows it down and pressurizes it so that we’ll be able to absorb about 20 percent more oxygen in each breath. This will make an incredible difference, obviously. It allows you to take fewer breaths to get more oxygen; it allows your cardiorespiratory system, and more, to work more efficiently. 

We breathe some 25,000 times a day. If we are struggling to do that, or doing it dysfunctionally, it will wear our bodies down. Simply learning to breathe normally can have a transformative effect on the mind and body and I’ve seen lives changed by adopting the simplest of healthy breathing practices. 

The biggest part of healthy breathing is nasal breathing. It all starts there. 

Can you discuss the specific relationship between chewing and the development of mouthbreathing?

To develop properly, the mouth and face need the proper inputs. They need exercise. The chewing and sucking stress required of a breastfeeding infant will help to widen the mouth and pull the face outward into a more functional, prognathic profile. This forward growth and wider mouth makes it easier to breathe. 

After breastfeeding, children need to continue to exercise their mouths and jaws by eating real, whole foods. The first few years of childhood sets the foundation for how we’ll look, and breathe, in adulthood. The wider the mouth is, the larger the airway, the less susceptible we’ll be to snoring, sleep apnea, and other breathing dysfunctions. 

Our ancestors were all breastfed, and they were weaned onto real, whole foods. They had universally wide mouths, wide airways, and powerful prognathic profiles. This is not a coincidence. It’s also not a coincidence why every other species of mammal also has and continues to have straight teeth and enormous, well-developed airways. Modern humans are bottlefed then weaned onto soft, processed foods. Today, we hardly chew at all, and because of this most of us have crooked teeth and that backwards, retrognathic profile and the airway obstruction and respiratory ailments that come with it. Look around. The proof is everywhere, just few of us (including me) had ever noticed before.

People have to wear masks now to prevent getting (and the spread of) coronavirus—what effect might this have on our breathing? Is it still better to breathe through the nose if one is wearing a mask?

So many people have written to me and said that when they wear a mask they can’t breathe because they aren’t getting enough oxygen. Surgeons and dentists and other medical professionals have worn masks all day for decades. They do not suffer from any oxygen deprivation unless they are in a room with poor ventilation. In other words, there is no oxygen deficiency caused by wearing a mask. Numerous studies have shown this. If you don’t believe the studies, you can see for yourself. Put on a mask and start breathing. Then put on a pulse oximeter and check your blood saturations. They won’t change unless your breathing changes. 

The “suffocation” people are responding to is mental. Further, it’s important to note that the need to breathe isn’t even triggered by oxygen. It’s triggered by carbon dioxide.  Right now, if you exhale and hold your breath, that feeling of suffocation you feel? That’s rising levels of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream. 

I’ve heard that some very thick masks may just slightly increase carbon dioxide because they trap a bit of air during the exhale. A slight increase won’t cause any negative side effects, and, in fact, could actually benefit many of us. Carbon dioxide is a powerful vasodilator, which helps release oxygen to hungry cells and expand blood vessels for easier circulation. Many of us tend to breathe too much, and make our blood alkaline, which can cause constriction (and the cold hands and feet and lightheadedness that comes with it). This is one of the reasons why breathing slowly, and slightly raising your carbon dioxide levels, can warm the extremities in the body. We’ve got more blood traveling through those 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the body. That can only be a good thing. 

This is all very well-known and established, and yet so many people keep posting comments on websites and writing me letters about how they are suffocating while wearing a mask. If they spent just a few minutes looking at the science of breathing and biology of the human body, they’d realize how misdirected such claims are. 

And yes, you should definitely breathe while wearing a mask. Masks are intended to protect you from infecting others. Your nose is the first line of defense against pathogens, including viruses. 

In the same vein, what would you suggest to counteract any negative habits or health effects from long-term mask use, like what essential workers must do for long shifts?

I have seen no long-term health effects of long-term mask use as long as the mask is medical-grade and not some cheap thing made of plastic and coated in chemicals. Again, dentists and other medical professionals have worn masks for decades and decades, and I’ve seen no reports of any side effects on blood gasses or anything else. Most of us are asked to wear masks for an hour or two a day, outside. This won’t cause any imbalance in blood gasses. It’s not a lot to ask. 

You dedicate quite a lot of the book to the discussion of the “lost” arts of breathing—can you detail some of the methods you re-discovered and how we can use them today?

Often when people talk about healthy breathing, they focus on “taking a big breath in.” But the exhale is just as important. You can’t take a healthy breath or air in if you haven’t gotten all that stale air out. Carl Stough’s work at V.A. hospitals (and later with the U.S. Olympic track team) was so fascinating to me, because he did nothing more than teach people how to breathe properly, first focusing on that big exhale. His patients with severe emphysema were instructed to engage more diaphragmatic motion, to exhale more so they could inhale a little more; so many of those patients -- essentially left for dead -- walked out of the hospital after breathing therapy. Meanwhile, the U.S. Olympic track team he trained went on to win more medals than any other track team in history. They were the only team to not use oxygen before or after a race. They didn’t need to. They had been trained in the subtle air of breathing. 

Tummo breathing was another lost technique we’ve remastered, the practice of using breath to heat up the body in cold temperatures. For centuries, Bön and Buddhist monks claimed to be able to sit out in the snow for hours and hours and melt a circle around themselves, never suffering from frostbite or hypothermia. A Belgian-French opera singer and former anarchist named Alexandra David-Neel rediscovered this technique in the early 1900s and used it to heat and nourish her body as she trekked through India and the Himalayas for 14 years. She took a lot of notes, but no scientist took any of her accounts seriously. 

Then, in the 1970s and 80s, a Harvard Medical School researcher named Herbert Benson traveled to India, gathered some monks, rigged them with sensors, placed them in a room, and recorded what was happening in their bodies and brains. The ancient stories, it turned out, were true. These monks were able to decrease their metabolic rates by 64 percent (the lowest recorded in a scientific experiment) and yet raise the temperature of their extremities by 17 degrees. According to medical books, this is impossible, but the data doesn’t lie, and many other scientific studies have confirmed the same thing since. It just shows how little we know about the potential of the human body--and breathing. 

Can technology help improve these techniques and their effects, and if so, how?

The best technology we have is in our brain, noses, lips, and lungs. This technology has been developed and perfected over eons. “More than sixty years of research on living systems has convinced me that our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailments suggests,” wrote Nobel laureate Albert Szent‐Györgyi. “Its shortcomings are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it.” 

So, no, we don’t need any special technology to learn how to breathe better. Some apps, inspiratory muscle trainers, and wearables may help us keep track of schedules or methods, and they can be helpful for people who need that extra support. But healthy breathing, like so much else in health and wellness, ultimately comes down to awareness and willpower. The best part is these methods are free, easy, and available to anyone who cares to use them. 

Have you noticed an increase in medical research into the science of breath since the pandemic?

Absolutely. I’d been working on this book fulltime for five years, and it had been scheduled to come out in late spring 2021 from September 2020. Nobody had any idea, of course, that in March we’d be hit by a global respiratory pandemic that destroyed the lungs and sapped us of our most basic biological need: breathing. Westerners are reactionary; it’s only when we lose something that so many of us start to pay attention to it. 

If there’s any silver lining to this awful COVID pandemic, I think it’s made us more aware of our breath. I’ve talked to so many researchers who have spent decades in this field. Many had been frustrated that their work hadn’t been more widely known because they were discovering such an important and accessible way to heal people. Now, finally, they are getting a lot more attention. The science is very clear, and there’s a lot of it -- thousands of papers. Academics at leading institutions (like Stanford University and Harvard) are now eager to add to the foundation of respiratory research. It’s very exciting, and I look forward to seeing what their studies will teach us. 

Are there specific breathing techniques that you’ve noticed are helping you during these higher-stress times that others might benefit from?

For sure. A few I use often (These were especially useful under deadline to deliver this book!): 

Take two breaths, one on top of another, and then let it all out. Exhale through the nose, or with a ssswwwwooossssssshhhhh sound through the mouth (for this short exercise, mouth exhales are completely fine). I learned this practice from Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford. He calls it a “physiological sigh.” This quick technique can trigger a subset of neurons in the brain that are responsible for sighing. This helps relax the body and diffuse stress. Think of a lion about to lay down for a nap, or a dog, or a cat. They often let out a big sigh right before sleep. We can do it too, and it’s a great way to very quickly relax. 

The rest of the time, I try to inhale to a count of about 5 or 6 and exhale to the same count. Don’t worry if you’re a little too fast or slow -- the point is to calm yourself. This “resonant breathing” coordinates various functions in the body to work at peak efficiency and helps organize areas in the brain so you can think more clearly. Sound crazy? I thought so until I looked at the studies and then saw the effects for myself. If you have a heart rate variability monitor or a blood pressure gauge record data before and a few minutes after breathing this way. The changes, I’ve found, are not subtle. 

What does a healthy, beneficial breathing pattern look and feel like? 

Our every day breathing should be silent. Effortless. Subtle. Light. Rhythmic. Deep. You should never hear someone, or yourself, breathing. Breathing should be almost imperceptible. So many people overdo it, and that just causes so much unnecessary stress and fatigue on the body. Focus on making your breathing as light and gentle and fluid as possible. That might be difficult at first; don’t push it. Habits can take weeks or months to break. Relax and progress slowly. Think of the ocean, the tides coming in and returning to the sea. That’s how we should breathe; that’s how the body will be best able to function. It’s important to note that Tummo, Wim Hof Method, and vigorous pranayamas follow a different set of rules for a different purpose. They purposely stress the body out in a controlled period of time, essentially working as a pressure release valve so that the rest of the day and night we can be calm, collected, and breathing softly and comfortably. I call these Breathing+ techniques because they build on the foundation of that slow, easy, deep, and light nasal breathing. I get much more deeply into this in the book, of course. 

What are some signs (mental and physical) of incorrect or dangerous breathing that people should look out for? 

Mouthbreathing. Sighing a lot. Audible breathing. Cessation of breathing. Constant coughing. High-chest breathing. The inability to comfortably hold the breath on an exhale for more than 10 to 15 seconds. There are many more. Once you see these signs, you can never unsee them! They are so prevalent in modern culture, especially in children. And it’s children who can benefit so much from improving their breathing. 

How quickly might people expect improvements after consciously correcting their breathing?

Completely depends on the person and the particulars of their ailment or what they are trying to achieve. Everyone is different and everyone will adapt in different ways. 

To be clear, breathing is not a panacea, it is not a blanket prescription to solve all health problems. Just like how healthy food or exercising or taking prescription medicine won’t solve all your problems. Breathing is part of a foundation of health; it’s one piece of the puzzle. 

Having said that, there is a substantial body of science showing how breath training can be very effective in helping to abate or even reverse the symptoms of anxiety, panic, asthma, and sometimes even some autoimmune diseases. Again, not all breathing techniques are going to impact everyone. But the good news is that adopting healthier breathing habits has no negative side effects: it costs nothing, and it’s available to everyone no matter where you live. Healthy breathing can only contribute to health, it can only benefit us. Over so many years in this field, I have never ever seen or heard anyone who has regretted learning how to breathe better!

Is there a sport or habit that you’ve noticed automatically corrects breathing, or helps to train the body to breath correctly?

No. Because you can breathe as dysfunctionally in sports as you can at rest or while sleeping, or any other time. I always figured track runners had to be some of the best breathers in the world. But they are just as susceptible (sometimes more susceptible) to respiratory disorders as the rest of the population. The same is true about weight lifters, or cyclers, or swimmers. 

The best way to train – in any sport – is to learn how to become an obligate nasal breather. Then train yourself to breathe slowly, fluidly, deeply, and softly. 

Similarly, which techniques can help athletes (hobbyists or professionals) improve their performance?

Learning how to breath light, slow, and deep will benefit everyone: from the asthmatic to the ultramarathoner. These sounds too simple to be true, I know. Sometimes the simplest things offer the most rewards. No matter what fancy vitamins or nutritional goos or pre-packaged powders are produced, nothing will ever be healthier than eating the simplest, whole foods. Nature is simple, yet subtle. As is breathing. 

Can you speak a little on the intense Stanford study you participated in for two weeks?

I interviewed Dr. Jayakar Nayak, the Chief of Rhinology Research at Stanford, several times. Dr. Nayak knew more about the nose and its essential role in health than anyone. He told me that habitual mouth breathing has been linked to neurological disorders, periodontal disease, growth problems, increased risk of respiratory infection, and so on. Nobody was really refuting this. The science was clear. But, what nobody knew was how quickly this damage set in. Nayak and I were curious to find out. 

We put together a 20-day experiment, and I volunteered to participate, as did Anders Olsson, a Swedish breathing therapist I’d met while researching the book. We stuffed silicon up our noses and breathed only through our mouths for ten days. Then, in Phase 2 of the experiment, we placed tape on our mouths and attempted to breathe as often as we could from our noses for another ten days. We compared datasets at the end and see if a sudden and chronic switch of the pathways would have any effect on our health. 

It did. Within a single night of mouthbreathing, my snoring increased by 1,300 percent. 

A few days later it doubled, then tripled. I suddenly had sleep apnea. My blood pressure shot up into stage II hypertension while my stress levels spiked and cognitive scores plummeted. I felt anxious, stressed, fatigued -- terrible. 

The day I switched to nasal breathing, snoring dramatically decreased. Two days later it had completely disappeared along with sleep apnea. Since breathing only through my nose at night, I haven’t snored since. Anders Olsson, the other subject in the study, suffered the exact same damage from mouthbreathing only worse...and his recovery was even more pronounced. Meanwhile, once back to nose-breathing, my blood pressure lowered about 30 points from its high the previous week. 

What did a study with two people prove? Nothing. We just experienced personally what scientists have known for decades. It is no coincidence why snoring and sleep apnea increase dramatically during allergy season (with our noses plugged, we breathe through our mouths!). And it’s no coincidence that blood pressure can increase while mouthbreathing and decrease while nasal breathing -- how we breathe affects our heart rate, circulation, brain function, and so much more. This has all been well-established. 

Will switching to nasal breathing cure all snoring and sleep apnea and hypertension? For some people, perhaps. For others the effects will be much more subtle. But no matter who you are or what ails you, breathing through the nose -- day and night -- can only help you. There are no drawbacks. 

Having said that, I must admit, it was something else entirely to feel these changes within my own body, and to see how dramatically -- and quickly -- they occurred. What was so sad to me was that an estimated 25 to 50 percent of the population habitually breathes through the mouth. And more than a quarter of us suffer from chronic nasal obstruction, with the numbers higher for children. And yet so few of us know all the damage that we’re causing our bodies breathing this way. I was a mouthbreather growing up. I breathed with an open mouth during sleep for most of my entire adult life, just like an estimated 60 percent of the population. I wish I knew then what I know now. 

Who were some of the most interesting people you spoke with in your research travels?

Too many to mention; too many favorites. The greatest privilege I have in writing books is meeting interesting people who have dedicated their lives to studying interesting things. When those interesting things happen to be things that are free and easy and available for anyone to use to improve their health, even better. 

I think one of the most inspiring people I corresponded with was Maurice Debaurd. Daubard had spent his teenage years bedridden in a French village hospital with tuberculosis, chronic lung inflammation, and other illnesses. By his 20s, the doctors had given up. They were planning to surgically remove parts of his lungs. But Daubard decided to heal himself. He read books, trained in yoga, and taught himself Tummo. He not only completely cured his body of any sickness but gained a superhuman strength.

On his off hours of working as a hairdresser he’d strip to his underwear and run barefoot through snowy forests. Daubard would immerse himself in ice from the neck down and sit there motionless for 55 minutes. Later, he ran 150 miles beneath the searing sun of the Sahara desert. At 71, he toured the Himalayas on his bike at an elevation of 5,000 meters. But his greatest feat, Daubard said, was helping thousands of others with illnesses learn the power of Tummo to heal themselves, just as he’d done. 

“The human is not only an organism . . . it is also a mind whose strength used wisely can allow us to repair our body when it wobbles,” wrote Daubard. When I was interviewing him, Daubard had just turned 89. He was still playing harp, reading without glasses, and leading breathing retreats in the Italian Alps above Aosta, where students join him in stripping down to underwear and sitting in the snow for an hour, then hike half‐naked up mountains, and finish with a dip in an ice‐covered alpine lake.

Breathing was for the “reconstitution of man’s immune system,” Daubard proclaimed. “It’s a fabulous way for the future of man’s health.” 

How did you become a writer?

I was born in Tustin, California, a lower-upper-middle class suburb in Orange County and was the youngest of two siblings, a brother and a sister. My father was a former Air Force pilot and engineer for navigational equipment for nuclear submarines. He worked at the same company for more than 40 years. People who grew up outside of southern California view it as some sun-soaked dreamland. It was actually the opposite of hippy, peace, dreamcatchers, flip-flops, any of that. The suburb where I grew up and lived my entire youth was conservative, paranoid, pretty racist, and altogether stifling to anything outside the proscribed norms. You were born and bred to go to school, get a job, have kids, and die. Some people seemed totally content living this way, and that is fine. At around 14 my friends and I started questioning this set-up, as most teenages are wont to do. Around that time, the one time parents were inspired to demonstrate at our school was to protest to keep kids from being bussed in from less wealthy neighborhoods. The parents won. Things just started to feel a bit, well, off.  

I was lucky enough to find some solid friends and form a punk rock band inspired by the whole straight edge movement popular at the time in Orange County. I had never played an instrument, beyond the clarinet, for a few months in third grade. Luckily I had an older brother who was an aspiring rocker but too lazy to actually learn an instrument. He’d bought a kid’s bass, one of those three-quarter scale things, at a thrift store for, I think, $75. It was made by Cort, and it was awful. Terrible action and had a sound like a barking dog. In other words, it worked perfectly for our brash music. The band was called Care Unit, after the alcohol addiction rehabilitation centers whose commercials played nonstop on local Orange County and Los Angeles stations at the time. We named our band after those commercials, really. We played a bunch of parties but mostly just printed up stickers and plastered them around our high school, Foothill High. After spending my whole life in Tustin, in the same house with the same phone number, the same phone, the same bed and bed spread, kitchen knives, and door mats, I moved to northern California at 18 to study the most anti-1980s-era Orange County subjects: literature and art history. I eventually earned a Masters of the Arts in English and a minor in art history with certification to teach English composition. The universities I attended are not really worth mentioning. 

Speaking of things not really worth mentioning, let me tell you about my professional life after college. What to do with a degree in English and art? Work at an envelope factory estimating the cost of custom expansion envelopes, naturally. That’s what I did. It was awful. Eventually I managed to get a gig writing advertisements and marketing copy for the Kimpton Group, a hotel and restaurant management company in San Francisco – a great job. Years later I was copy chief of NextMonet, a San Francisco-based startup that sold fine art online. For a short time, I managed special projects for the furniture and art gallery, Limn, including the Limn Almanac and The City in China, both incredibly audacious projects which, like most audacious projects, crashed and burned without ever getting off the ground. 

In the early 2000s, and in need of a bit more security (e.g. at least a few zeroes in my sad bank account) I got a job as a copywriter at an education policy non-profit foundation called WestEd. The foundation was funded almost entirely by federal funds. I got to see where my, and your, tax money goes, at least in education policy. There were hundreds of people working at this place, just rows of cubicles and offices. They just sat around refreshing their emails…waiting for something, anything, to happen. It was the most Kafkaesque existence. It was incredibly easy, but also, after a few years, an incredibly sad way to live one’s life. 

To keep my brain from liquifying, I adopted a bunch of hobbies, and a dog. I’d surf early in the morning and then drive directly to the office. I began reading a lot, and writing. I wanted to write magazine stories. I took a class, read some more books, and started pitching dozens of magazines. All of my pitches were unanimously and unceremoniously ignored. A year or two after hearing nothing from nobody I got a speculative assignment for the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine on this language called Esperanto that was created over 100 years ago and, apparently, quite popular throughout Eastern Europe. The story was a bit of a hit, at least with my editor. She assigned me several more stories. It was a thrill, really wonderful. I wrote about big wave surfing miles off the coast of San Francisco coast and a subculture of auto mechanics who collected used cooking oil from restaurants and used it as fuel for antique Mercedes-Benz cars and other strangeness. It was a pure joy, to take my time with these subjects, working alongside experts in the field, having strange new revelations discovering strange new revelations about the world and our place in it, separating science from myths. It’s all I thought about, all I ever wanted to do. Still is. I couldn’t fathom that people, at least a few lucky people, actually did this kind of work for a living. I was sure I could not; the money, even for magazine cover stories, was laughably miniscule. So for years and years I just wrote at night and weekends. It was a pure joy, really just an excuse to hang out and learn from interesting people doing interesting things. 

From 2008 to 2018, I was invited to become a member of The San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, a private community of working writers that included bestselling authors Po Bronson, Mary Roach, Julia Scheers, Caroline Paul, Ethan Watters, and several others. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by writers who actually worked, some even seemed to almost make a living at it. So, I quit my job at WestEd and went for it. I tried to make the transition to work full time as a writer. It was, largely, a heinous fiasco. I kept writing magazine features, which was great, but at the same time I kept watching my savings dwindle away. I couldn’t ever go back to an office job. So I dug in, worked harder, wrote more: most nights, all day. During that time, Outside magazine responded to a crazy pitch I’d sent to follow a group of professional surfers in an attempt to discover never-before-ridden waves in the Arctic Circle. A month later I was freezing in Norway, surfing, and watching a bipolar photographer literally lose his sanity. The story, “Tasty Freeze,” was published on January 5, 2010 and was nominated for the Best American Sports Writing of 2011. 

My next assignment for Outside magazine was to cover an international freediving competition. This was like a new birth day in my career, and life. Watching these people do it, to freedive, shattered my world. I couldn’t help wondering how many wondrous abilities and skills we, as a species, had lost and were losing sitting around in offices all day. I wanted to spend the rest of my life, researching the science behind our lost potential, and how to get it back. The story, “Open Your Mouth and You’re Dead,” was released on January 25, 2012 and generated interest from book publishers. I got a contract for my first nonfiction book, DEEP, from that story. In short, my writing career was an overnight success that took about a decade. 

I started writing seriously so late in life, too late in many ways. Nobody thought I could pull it off, especially me. I always warn aspiring writers from this path. Unless you’ve got some family money, or your own money, stored up, doing this for a living will very likely lead to destitution: destroy your relationships, finances, sleep, and social life. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I can’t tell you what a wonderful feeling it is to wake up every day and be curious about the world – to have an excuse to test things, to measure them, to dispel myths and bluster and try to reveal larger truths about our abilities and place on this planet. I will never take any part of this job for granted.