Breath

Breath

*James Nestor*

On the twenty-second day of the experiment, James Nestor woke up at three in the morning absolutely certain he was dying. His heart was hammering. The pulse oximeter clipped to his finger read below 85 percent -- the threshold where emergency rooms begin to take serious interest. He was drenched in sweat. He had just logged twenty-five obstructive sleep apnea episodes in a single night, each one a moment where his airway collapsed, his body lurched awake without him knowing, and his brain fired off a cascade of stress hormones into the dark. His systolic blood pressure had climbed to 142 millimeters of mercury. Stage 2 hypertension. The danger zone.

He had been healthy when the experiment started. He was still healthy in every conventional sense. The only thing that had changed was this: his nostrils had been plugged with medical-grade silicone, sealed with surgical tape, for ten days straight. He had been forced to breathe exclusively through his mouth -- the way roughly half the people alive breathe every night without anyone telling them it is a problem.

The year was recent. The location was Stanford University. The researcher overseeing everything was Dr. Jayakar Nayak, a professor of otolaryngology with a rigorous scientific mind and, apparently, a high tolerance for watching a journalist suffer in the name of data. Nestor's partner in the experiment was Anders Olsson, a Swedish breathing therapist who kept a daily journal of his deteriorating mental state. After one week, Olsson wrote that it felt as if someone had pulled a damp cloth over his thinking. Nestor's snoring had increased by 4,820 percent. Not doubled. Not tripled. Nearly fifty times worse -- a number so outlandish it barely sounds real until you read the polysomnography printouts, which are very, very real.