Breath (2020) Review

So some of the claims in this book are absurd.

The author admits upfront that there is a paucity of credible historical scientific evidence for many of the book's pop-science case studies. This means much of the evidence is either quite new and thus relatively untested, the personal anecdotes of the author himself or his friend (n = 1, or sometimes 2), or much older plumbings straight out of the scribblings of this or that 20th or 19th century crank, or else even older religious texts and traditions. On some occasions the author pushes back on the dodgier claims (one cannot cure cancer through properly breathing through the nose, or, at least, we wouldn't stake our lives on it), but not always.

And yet...

The book wields a neat trick.

Because the subject matter and thesis of proper breathing are the reader's constant companion, the book is actionable literally as you read it. Much self-help and health advice has to be put into action away from the page, but if you breathe through the mouth, as I typically do, and you want to try the author's insistent instruction to instead breath in and out through the nose in 5.5 second rhythms, you can do so immediately. And indeed, tying this new behavior to the process of reading this book is both simple and reinforcing: The text reminds you to breathe in this way, and illuminates the potential benefits of doing so, and the simple focus on your in-and-out through the nose is gentle enough to not distract from digesting the words.

And I found that as I took almost exclusively slow breaths through my nose as I read, that it felt quite nice. A placebo? I don't know. But I know it felt quite nice.

A unique reading experience, to change a behavior as one reads and not afterwards, if one that I take with the proper, I think, amount of skepticism.