Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

“How do you like your ginger?” he asks as we slowly wave our arms overhead. I tell him it’s got more of a kick than I imagined. He still hasn’t exhaled.

Before I leave, we chat some more about the Esquire article. He does, eventually, exhale. I liked Blaine’s advice about trying to get air into every crevice of your upper body. But I wanted a second opinion.

I got it from a vocal coach named Justin Stoney. Stoney had me lie on the floor, put my hand on my stomach, and feel it rise when I inhaled. “Don’t even try to inhale,” he said. “Just push out your stomach, and you’ll create a vacuum, and the air will come in. When you exhale, flatten your stomach out.”

This stomach-breathing turned out to be a life changer. A small life changer, but still. When I run, I stomach-breathe, and I don’t do nearly as much huffing and puffing as I used to. It saves me from that unpleasant burning-chest feeling. I’m doing it right now, at my treadmill desk. I’m pushing out my stomach on the inhale so that it resembles an Andrew Weil–like potbelly, then sucking back in on the exhale.

Moments of Zen

I can’t leave the topic of deep breathing without mentioning meditation. Meditation, like yoga and libertarianism, has gone mainstream. Marines meditate cross-legged, their rifles on their laps, as part of their training. My six-year-old son does breathing exercises at school (though their mantra is the not-so-Hindi “sniff the flower, blow out the candle”). The medical benefits are rock-solid: lower rates of depression and heart disease, improved attention.

I first learned meditation from a Zen center in the Village when I wrote an article on unitasking—the art of doing only one thing at a time. For the past few months, I’ve been meditating a couple of times a week in the living room, after Julie’s gone to sleep, sitting on the floor and staring at the wall for ten minutes.

But lately, I’ve tried to meditate every day. Because of time constraints, I end up doing what I call contextual meditation. I meditate anywhere when I have five minutes—on the bus, on the subway, waiting for a walk sign.

I’m not alone. I found a wellness website with instructions on how to meditate in a noisy environment. I tried it when I was undergoing an MRI the other day (I was getting scanned for a brief episode of blurry vision, which turned out to be nothing.) Now, if you’ve never had an MRI, you should know that they are loud, almost comically so. The technician gives you earplugs, but that doesn’t come close to blocking the sound. The MRI has a repertoire of noises that resemble, in no particular order: a game-show buzzer for a wrong answer, urgent knocking, a modem from 1992, a grizzly-bear growl, and a man with a raspy voice shouting what sounds like “mother cooler!”

The key is to let the noise glide through your brain without stopping to interpret it. Don’t try to block out the sound waves. Just notice them as they float by, and say, “Isn’t that interesting.” The website tells us not to ponder the sounds’ origins. Instead focus on the tones and vibrations. “Mo-ther-coo-ler. Mo-ther-coo-ler.”

That’s quite a sound. But it doesn’t bother me. It was the most relaxing MRI of my life.

A Breath of Fresh Air

On a Wednesday for lunch, Julie and I go to visit my grandfather. He is, no surprise, stretched out on the recliner, wearing a red shirt with long sleeves. He looks older. His wrists are as thin as broomstick handles, his eyes rheumy. His breathing is labored. Which is understandable. As you age, the lungs deteriorate. They lose the air sacs and capillaries, the diaphragm weakens, the muscles get less elastic.

Julie leans down to kiss him.

“Hi, dear,” he says, in between breaths.

He asks about my boys, but I can tell he can’t remember their names.

“What are you working on, A.J.?” he asks.

I tell him I am writing about lungs. “You know, you helped New Yorkers’ lungs,” I say.

“Oh?” he says.

“All the mass transit projects you worked on. You helped cut down on pollution.”

“Oh, yes?”

He seems pleased, but confused. I remind him of his bold idea. Long a booster of the subway and bus system, my grandfather decided a couple of years ago that mass transit should be free, like water or radio. The result would be fewer people driving cars, less smog, more efficiency. He funded a study and lobbied the mayor.

“That’s going to happen soon,” he says. Typical optimism, perhaps delusional.

“Hope so,” I say.

New York’s air pollution is bad, but it could be much worse. The American Lung Association recently found it to be the seventeenth worst city for ozone pollution (Los Angeles got first) and the twenty-first for particle pollution (Bakersfield, California, won the title).

Air pollution causes all sorts of problems, including emphysema, asthma, and cardiac diseases. The World Health Organization estimates that 2.1 million people die from air-pollution-related diseases every year. But that’s just a rough guess. It’s unclear how many New Yorkers succumb.

The best you can do is try to keep your house’s air clean. Don’t use scented candles or products. Clean the air conditioner every year. Some doctors say you should open the windows for fifteen minutes a day, because indoor air tends to be dirtier than outdoor air. If you have lung problems, buy a HEPA filter. Don’t bike or jog on busy roads, because the car fumes do more damage when you’re breathing heavily. And if you’re really committed, buy an N95 surgical mask, a special kind that screens out particles. I tested one out while walking on my smelly, rubber-burning treadmill. It was rain-forest hot to breathe into it.

“You seem to have survived the pollution, Grandpa,” Julie points out.

“Still hanging in there,” he replies, smiling.

“Actually, you picked a good place to live, Grandpa,” I say.

I tell him that despite the pollution, New York has a surprisingly high life expectancy: 78.6