Breath showed many people the door to better health, but the door opens only through practice.
By Rachel Moore, Health and Science Writer
There is a moment in James Nestor’s book Breath that stops most readers cold.
It arrives quietly, somewhere in the middle of a chapter about carbon dioxide. Nestor describes a physiological principle so simple and so counterintuitive that you have to re-read it twice to believe it. The principle is this: breathing more air does not deliver more oxygen to your cells. In some circumstances, it does the opposite.
Most people who have spent their lives managing asthma, or sleep apnea, or chronic fatigue, have never encountered this idea in a doctor’s office. They encounter it, for the first time, in a bestselling book by a journalist.
That gap between what the science shows and what most people are told is, in a sense, the story Breath tells. And it is also the story that brought Nestor to Boulder, Colorado, to sit across from Sasha Yakovleva, co-founder of the Buteyko Breathing Center, with a heavily annotated copy of her book in his hands.
A Book That Can Answer Questions but Can’t Offer a Solution
Breath was published in 2020. Nestor had rushed to complete the manuscript following his publisher’s advice, with the goal of getting the book out during the pandemic. The timing, as it turned out, served the book well. A work about the largely overlooked science of how we breathe landed at exactly the moment when breathing had become something millions of people were thinking about for the first time.
It sat on bestseller lists for months. It found its way into households, podcast conversations, and the kind of late-night reading that makes you put the book down and stare at the ceiling.
Part of its power was the questions it raised. Not all of which it could fully answer.
Nestor documented the science of chronic overbreathing and its consequences with admirable clarity. He explained the Bohr effect, the mechanism by which CO2 levels in the blood determine how readily hemoglobin releases oxygen to the tissues. He traced the history of the Buteyko Method from Dr. Konstantin Buteyko‘s clinical work in the Soviet Union through the randomized trials in Australia and New Zealand. He met with Sasha’s students whose lives had changed and wrote about them with honesty.
But a book, however good, cannot teach you to breathe. It can only point in a direction.
“I have seen this pattern so many times,” Yakovleva told me when we spoke. “Someone reads Breath, they understand what is happening in their body, they recognize themselves in what James describes. And then they do not know what to do next. The book raised their awareness. But awareness alone does not change a breathing pattern that has been established over decades.”
The Annotated Copy
Nestor had been in contact with Yakovleva for a while before the research visits that shaped the Less chapter. He had read her book Breathe to Heal and reached out by email, asking whether he could fly to Colorado to discuss the method directly and understand it better. She agreed.
He arrived at their first meeting with a copy of Breathe to Heal that had nearly every page underlined and annotated in pencil. One of the students in the room noticed it and commented that he seemed to have studied the book very thoroughly. Nestor smiled and said he still had a lot of questions.
It is a response that tells you something about the quality of his research. He was not collecting quotes to confirm a thesis. He was genuinely trying to understand something that his existing framework did not fully account for.
He had been investigating breathwork across many traditions. What distinguished the Buteyko Method in his research was that it offered a methodical, measurable, and scientifically grounded way to guide people from a state of disease toward a state of health. Its foundation in carbon dioxide physiology, combined with its documented history of clinical application, first within the Soviet medical system and later through Western randomized trials, made it very different from a breathing approach created by a lone enthusiast after a personal eureka moment.
The Boulder visits were not limited to formal meetings. After visiting Sasha’s office and meeting for tea with her students, mostly those who reduced or overcame asthma symptoms, he also came to her home.
The Door and the Room Beyond It
In the years since Breath was published, Yakovleva has seen a version of the same thing happen that happened after the New York Times published an article about the Buteyko Breathing Center and one of its students, David Wiebe.
Wiebe had dramatically reduced his asthma medication after learning and applying the Buteyko method at the Buteyko Breathing Center. The Times article described his experience in detail. Within weeks of publication, the center received thousands of inquiries from people with asthma who had, in Yakovleva’s words, suddenly discovered that there was a way out.
“The Times article opened a door,” she said. “It raised awareness. People who read it realized that their breathing could be changed, that asthma was not simply a condition to be managed by medication forever. But the door was not the room. The article could tell them the room existed. It could not take them inside.”
Breath has done something similar, on a much larger scale.
“James’s book brought breathing into public awareness in a way that had never happened before in the English-speaking world,” Yakovleva told me. “Millions of people now understand, at least in principle, that the way we breathe affects our health in profound ways. That is an extraordinary thing. It is also just the beginning.”
What the Book Gets Right, and What It Cannot Do
Nestor’s treatment of the Buteyko Method in Breath is accurate in its core claims. He describes the overbreathing-CO2 mechanism correctly, and he presents the Soviet clinical history with more accuracy than most Western accounts manage. He does not sensationalize.
The history he describes is documented in detail in Dr. Buteyko’s biography on the Breathing Center website. The Soviet Ministry of Health formally recommended the method in 1985, following decades of clinical work by Buteyko himself. The method was not waiting to be discovered in the West. It had already been introduced into medical practice in the system where Buteyko worked, long before Western researchers began examining it.
What a book cannot do, which no book can do, is produce a physiological change.
Reading about CO2 tolerance does not raise your CO2 tolerance. Understanding the Bohr effect does not change how your hemoglobin behaves at rest tonight. Knowing that chronic overbreathing generates airway constriction does not stop the airways from constricting.
“This is not a criticism of the book,” Sasha Yakovleva said carefully. “It is a description of how change actually works. To change a breathing pattern that has been automatic for thirty or forty years, you need structured practice. You need exercises adapted to your specific baseline. You need someone who can read your responses and adjust. You need months, not days. James understood this. He writes about it honestly.”
Nestor does write about it. There is a passage in Breath where he describes understanding the Buteyko Method intellectually and finding that the understanding did not immediately translate into physical change. The knowledge was present. The embodied shift had to come separately, through practice and guidance.
That gap is exactly what the Buteyko Breathing Center was built to close.
What Guided Practice Actually Involves
The Breathing Normalization Training at the Buteyko Breathing Center is not a group class but an individual program. It begins with an assessment of the student’s current breathing pattern, measured through a tool called the Control Pause, a simple post-exhale breath hold that serves as a practical index of CO2 tolerance.
Most people who arrive with asthma measure somewhere between five and twenty seconds. A healthy range sits above forty seconds.
The program builds from wherever a person is to raising their CO2 levels. Exercises are adapted to each person’s starting point and adjusted as the student’s responses evolve. Nasal breathing is established as the body’s default, both during waking hours, during sleep, and while speaking. Over weeks and months, the Control Pause rises. As it rises, the threshold at which symptoms occur moves higher. Medication use decreases as a natural result, always in coordination with the student’s physician.
Sachin came to the center after reading Breath. He had been managing asthma and low energy for years. In the book’s description of chronic overbreathing, he recognized himself. He had a Private Session with Yakovleva, then enrolled in the Buteyko Breathing Normalization Training course and later in the BreathMastery program with his wife. His full story is on the site for anyone who wants to read it.
His experience follows a pattern Yakovleva has seen many times among people who arrive through the book. They come with context – the vocabulary of CO2 tolerance and the Bohr effect is not new to them. What is new is the practice itself, the slow, patient, daily work of changing what the body has been doing automatically for most of a lifetime. David Wiebe came through the Times. Sachin came through Breath. The door was different. The room was the same.
What Comes After Reading
I asked Yakovleva what she would say to someone who had read Breath, recognized themselves in it, and was now wondering what to do.
She paused before answering, which is something she does when she wants to be precise.
“I would say that the book did something real for you. It helped you see that this question is worth asking. And that is not a small thing. However, the solution is not in the book — it is in the practice. Dr. Buteyko said that his method is easy to understand but difficult to apply, and this is why guidance matters. The practice, at least in the beginning, typically requires a guide. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that breathing is automatic. We live inside our own breathing patterns, so we cannot always see them clearly enough to change them. Someone else has to observe them, point them out, and offer a methodology to shift them — step by step, week by week, and sometimes month by month.”
It is a useful distinction. Breath raised the question. The Buteyko Breathing Center is one of the places where people go to find the solution.
If you read the book and found yourself in its pages, the next step is a conversation. Not another book. Not another podcast. A direct assessment of your own breathing with someone trained to read it.
Book a Private Session with Sasha
About This Article
Rachel Moore is a health and science writer. This article is based on conversations with Sasha Yakovleva, Advanced Buteyko Specialist and co-founder of the Buteyko Breathing Center, and on research conducted at the Center in Colorado. James Nestor’s book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art is published by Riverhead Books. The interview with James Nestor is available on the Breathing Center website.
Medical Disclaimer
The services provided by the Buteyko Breathing Center are educational in nature. Sasha Yakovleva is a Buteyko Breathing Normalization Specialist and educator, not a medical doctor. Nothing in this article constitutes medical advice. All decisions about medication should be made in full consultation with your physician. Results vary from person to person.
