The book that helped me beat insomnia

Plus: why we need less ‘life-changing’ reads and more life-tweaking ones

It starts an hour before bed. I switch off the lights, turn the TV down to a whisper and lie flat on the sofa. With my mouth closed I inhale slowly through my nose – one…two…three…four… – then hold my breath for the same amount of time again. Next I exhale for eight seconds with a slow whoosh, like I’m inflating a balloon. After 20-30 minutes of this, my body starts to melt and my mind begins flickering in and out of consciousness like a candle caught in a draft. I go to bed, and feel relaxed enough to fall asleep.

I learned the technique by reading Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by the journalist James Nestor. Published in 2020, it unpacks the history of how humans inhale and exhale and the way this has been shaped – literally – by the rise of technology. For thousands of years, we spent our days constantly chewing tough, raw fibres. Then over a course of a few centuries, industrialisation meant our diets got softer, more refined and full of sugar. Processed foods meant “mouths shrank and facial bones grew stunted,” which turned many of us into ‘mouth-breathers’ (in one the book’s more vivid passages, Nestor visits the creepy catacombs under Paris to see this evolutionary change play out across a pile of human skulls). Mouth-breathing, Nestor discovers, is all kinds of terrible for your health; a leading cause of snoring, sleep apnea, asthma and autoimmune disease. If nothing else Breath will leave you with a new-found respect for your nose, which is where we should be taking in and filtering air. 

It also gave me my new nighttime routine. There is only a passing mention of sleep difficulties in Breath, but Nestor shares some science around relaxation that I hadn’t heard before. We all have something called the vagus nerve, running from the stems of our brain down to our abdomen. This nerve connects to all our major organs, and plays a key role in regulating functions like heart rate, digestion and whether we feel relaxed or stressed. Around the 1990s, a scientist called Stephen W. Porges made a discovery: the vagus never can be literally hacked by breathing. When we take slow, deep breaths – especially through our nose – it stimulates the vagus nerve and tells the brain to reduce feelings of stress and anxiety (it’s particularly effective to exhale for longer than you inhale). People have known about this for centuries through practises like yoga and meditation. But like so much about the brain-body connection, the science explaining how and why it happens is relatively new. This helps explain why ‘breathwork’ has been a leading wellness trend for the past few years.  

What I like about Breath is that Nestor is not a medical expert or someone presenting themselves as a guru. He’s just a sceptical science journalist, trying to figure out the cause of something that has bugged him all his life (I try to approach the equally broad and universal topic of my own book in the same spirit). At the start of Breath he explains he is “in a rut – physically, mentally, and otherwise”, proving Irvine Welsh’s point that all good stories start with someone having a bad year applies as well to nonfiction as it does novels. Breath, like all the best nonfiction, makes you look at something you think you’ve understood your entire life in a completely new way.

Sleeping well has always been challenging for me. In the evening, my brain tends to switch into hyper vigilance mode, even if my body is tired. An hour of slow, deep breathing isn’t a miracle cure for this, but it definitely helps – in a way journaling, meditation and just switching off screens at 9pm does not. Crucial to this, for me at least, was learning the science of why it works over 200 pages of patient, investigative reporting, rather than taking some YouTube instructional video on face value. Books let us warm to the idea of trying something new slowly, and make it our own. 

I like to think of reading books about lifestyle or self-improvement as a bit like being a bird building a nest. You’re not looking for an entirely new set of answers or way to live your life, just a small idea or a perspective on something that stands out. That one good twig can then be used, alongside hundreds of others, to build your unique vantage point on the world. In publishing, books are routinely described as ‘life-changing’. I settle for life-tweaking. I’ve decided to share more of these types of reads here in the coming months. For good reason, Breath by James Nestor has sold over two millions copies around the world.

Books in this post:
Breath by James Nestor