Essentials: Breathing for Mental & Physical Health & Performance | Dr. Jack Feldman

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my conversation with Dr. Jack Feldman. Thanks for joining me today.

Pleasure to be here, Andrew. You're my go-to source for all things respiration and how the brain and breathing interact. You're the person I call. Why don't we start off by just talking about what's involved in generating breath? So on the mechanical side, which is obvious to everyone, we um want to have air flow in, inhale, and we need to have air flow out.

And the reason we need to do this is because for body metabolism we need oxygen and when oxygen is utilized through the aerobic metabolic process, we produce carbon dioxide. And so we have to get rid of the carbon dioxide that we produce, in particular because the carbon dioxide affects the acid base balance of the blood, the pH, and all living cells are very sensitive to what the pH value is. So your body is very interested in regulating that pH.

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