She tried mouth taping instead. “The first night, I lasted five minutes before I ripped it off,” she told me. On the second night, she was able to tolerate the tape for ten minutes. A couple of days later, she slept through the night. Within six weeks, her nose opened up.

They gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity. The smaller and less efficient lungs became, the

SEVEN Chew

The techniques were many and they varied, but the purpose of each was to train patients to always breathe as closely as possible to their metabolic needs, which almost always meant taking in less air.

The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation

how each inhaled breath provides us with new energy and each exhale releases old, stale energy.

Although his health was failing, Catlin yearned to be far away in nature, to capture rawer and more real depictions of humanity. He packed a gun, several canvases, a few paintbrushes, and headed west. Catlin would spend the next six years traveling thousands of miles throughout the Great Plains, covering more distance than Lewis and Clark to

start counting from one to ten over and over with every exhale. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10—then keep repeating it,” she said. At the end of the exhale, when I was so out of breath I couldn’t vocalize anymore, I was to keep counting, but to do so silently, letting my voice trail down into a “sub-whisper.”

The point was to get the diaphragm accustomed to this wider range so that deep and easy breathing became unconscious. “Keep moving your lips!” Martin egged me on. “Get out the last little molecule of air!”