SARAH VINE reveals how breathing techniques pushed her through a difficult divorce

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What’s the one thing none of us can live without, not even for the shortest time? Food? Water? No, it’s breathing: cut that off, and we’re gone in a matter of seconds.

Yet breathing is something very few of us ever stop to think about. After all, it just happens, right? In, out, in, out, 22,000 times a day or thereabouts, just one of those miracles of nature we take for granted. Until it goes wrong. I first experienced what it’s like when you can’t breathe properly ten years ago.

Friends had invited my family to Beaver Creek, a ski resort some 8,000 ft high up in the Rocky Mountains of America’s Midwest.

I was beyond excited. I grew up in the shadow of the Italian Alps; skiing was as ordinary as going to a football game. You could catch a bus to one of the cheaper resorts and buy a day pass for the price of dinner and a cinema ticket. I loved the solitude, the clean air in my lungs, the cruel beauty of the mountains, that feeling of intense physical exhaustion at the end of a long day on the slopes.

I hadn’t done it for years, not since the children came along, and I had always dreamt of skiing the legendary peaks of Colorado. I didn’t need to be asked twice. But it wasn’t to be.

I was fine at first. But as I descended my first run through the crisp, early-morning air, the snow glistening beneath my skis, I began to feel very odd. All energy seemed to drain from my body. I was dizzy and short of breath. There was a ringing in my ears and my heart was beating loudly in my chest. Crikey, I thought, I must be more out of shape than I’d realised.

Other skiers whizzed past as I began to slow down. My back ached, I felt like there was a concrete cloak on my shoulders. An excruciating, hot sort of pain ran down my legs, as though someone were running a lit match along my shins. I slid to a halt and sat down in the snow, trying to catch my breath.

 

As my heart rate slowed, I began to feel better. I got up and tried to carry on. Again, that same feeling, as though every cell in my body were screaming in agony.

After a few more minutes of misery, I eventually gave up. I unclipped my boots, took off my skis, slung them over my shoulder and walked, slowly and painfully, back to base.

I had altitude sickness, of course. I didn’t realise at first, never once having experienced it — not even on the Matterhorn.

But then you ski much higher in the Rockies and I had only recently recovered from a nasty bout of pneumonia. When I finally went to the resort medical centre, after a couple more days of trying, and failing, to ski, my blood oxygen level reading on the pulse oximeter was 89.

They gave me oxygen and I spent the rest of the holiday in bed. As we descended back to normal altitude to catch the plane home, my symptoms gradually began to dissipate. But I shall never forget that awful feeling of my body being deprived of oxygen. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

And yet: there are hundreds of thousands of people over the past two years who have suffered precisely this fate.

Coronavirus attacks the lungs, and in severe cases prevents oxygen from getting around the body. It is this that, in turn, places the internal organs under intolerable strain and which can lead, ultimately, to death.

Even those who recover from this severe form of the illness find themselves left with serious health problems. Witness poor Derek Draper, the husband of Good Morning Britain presenter Kate Garraway.

I think this was one of the reasons I was drawn to James Nestor’s book Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art.

Watching harrowing news footage of Covid patients gasping for air, or hooked up to oxygen masks and ventilators, reminded me of my own miserable experience all those years ago. I shuddered to think what they were going through, and Nestor’s book struck a chord.

I was gripped from page one. It’s not just that Nestor can actually write — a bit of a rarity in the category of science literature, which is, I suppose, where this belongs.

He has such infectious enthusiasm for his subject and such a way with words there isn’t a dry passage in the whole book.

He brings a complex subject alive with humour and humanity, and takes the reader on an unexpected journey of self-discovery.

In essence, his message is this: we humans have lost the ability to breathe properly. Forget air pollution and tree pollen; it’s not what we breathe but how we breathe that’s making us sick.

He talks about how the strains of modern life can cause a form of stress apnoea; and how our habit of breathing through our mouths rather than our noses is contributing to so many of the modern ailments that plague us, from insomnia and brain fog to high blood pressure and even asthma.

‘Mouth-breathing’, as he calls it, can even alter our physical appearance, causing dark shadows under the eyes, an elongated long face, a high narrow palate, gum disease and tooth decay.

Nestor even conducts an experiment on himself to document these effects. It’s painful, but fascinating.

Our noses are designed to protect our lungs from the outside world — pathogens, pollutants — and yet between 25 and 50 per cent of the population are ‘mouth-breathers’.

This leads to a much lower oxygen intake, and can even trigger certain automatic stress responses, with the result that we develop all sorts of problems, ranging from the annoying (bad breath and hoarseness) to the downright debilitating (snoring, irritability, tiredness, sleep apnoea, and so on).

An astonishing 60-70 per cent of the population sleeps with an open mouth, which, says Nestor, probably accounts for why so many of us wake up feeling more exhausted than we were when we went to bed.

There’s much more to the book than that, of course — and I really do recommend it as an absolutely fascinating read, full of tantalising little nuggets of science and astonishing facts. But what I took away from it was the benefits of mindful breathing — and how it can transform not only the way we feel, but also our overall health.

I’ll be honest. It’s been a difficult year for me emotionally. My husband and I finally decided to go our separate ways, and however amicable our separation, it’s still been a painful process. You don’t unravel 20 years of marriage without experiencing a few long, dark nights of the soul — especially when, given who we both are, half the world is pointing and laughing.

There have been times when keeping the show on the road has felt hard. And when this happens, for some reason I feel it most acutely in my chest.

Even opening a tricky email, or having a mildly difficult phone call can trigger it.

My throat tightens in a bolus of worry, the muscles either side contracting. I struggle to fill my lungs, my breathing becomes quick and shallow, and my mind and body feel restless and irritable.

I sleep a lot, but I don’t sleep well. My children tell me I snore, and I wake often in the night with a dry throat, almost choking on the air in my bedroom.

It’s as though there’s something pressing down on my solar plexus, a sense that the breath is being squeezed out of me.

When I was young, I was a swimmer. A really good swimmer. I could take in a huge lungful of air and go whole lengths underwater, or dive deep in the sea, confident that my lungs could carry me anywhere. But lately, I’ve felt as though I was drowning. Then I read this book.

Nestor has taught me that, through simple exercises, I can reclaim my breath — and with it control over my life and emotions. Thanks to him, I understand the science and principles behind such breathing techniques as Nadi Shodhana (alternate nostril breathing) or the Wim Hof method, yogic breathing and more.

I understand now that they are not just silly woo-woo ideas practised by hairy eccentrics in loincloths (although, let’s face it, they often are), but real, practical solutions to the everyday stresses and strains of life.

But perhaps the most useful technique I’ve learned from Nestor, the bit of the book that has been most transformational for me personally, is mouth- taping. Yes, it sounds bonkers, I know; but this simple technique for stopping my mouth falling open while I am sleeping has made a huge difference to my quality of life.

I realised after reading Nestor’s book that I must have been a mouth-breather from a young age. All my life, I’ve suffered from throat infections and other upper respiratory diseases, and despite rigorous oral hygiene, my teeth had been pretty much destroyed by the time I reached the age of 30: all clear symptoms.

And so I took his advice. I went online and bought myself a packet of mouth-tapes — these are little strips made out of surgical tape that gently seal the lips during sleep.

At first, I tore them off after a few minutes. But I persisted, and after a few nights they were no more intrusive than a mouth guard or brace.

I am under no illusions: I must look utterly deranged, lying there with tape on my mouth. In fact, it’s probably just as well that no one has to share a bed with me any more.

But the results have been remarkable. The tape encourages me to breath through my nose, with notable effect.

I don’t wake up repeatedly in the night, gasping for water. When my alarm goes off, I no longer feel like I’m being roused from the dead, my legs and joints aching and stiff.

Instead of feeling like an old phone whose battery will never take a full charge, no matter how long you leave it plugged in, I feel restored.

My children even tell me the snoring has stopped. It’s more of a ‘snorfle’ now, my daughter says. I’ll take that.