This man says he can make YOU fitter, healthier and happier... by teaching you to BREATHE
And if you’re thinking ‘I can do that without any help, thanks’, take a deep breath and read on – like our writer, you might be surprised...
EVER thought about how you breathe? Well, why would you? After all, it’s something you’ve done every day, all by yourself, without any expert help, for all your life. Surely you’ve got it figured out by now, right? Wrong. Bad breathing, according to Stuart Sandeman, is like wearing your winter clothes on a hot summer’s day.
‘Or to use another analogy’, he says with a grin, ‘it’s like wearing your knickers back to front.’
Gosh. We are conducting a breathing session over Zoom, where I have already learnt that I am something called a collapsed breather, meaning that my posture is forcing my breathing downwards, which could lead to tiredness, headaches, shortness of breath and limited blood flow to the heart and lungs.
Eek. And I always thought it was as simple as, well, breathing in and breathing out again. Not according to Scots breath guru Sandeman, whose company, Breathpod, has taught breathing techniques to the executives of some of the world’s biggest companies, including Google, Nike and L’Oreal, and whose first book, cunningly named Breathe In, Breathe Out, is currently snaking its way up the bestseller lists.
‘Our breathing is always right but the physical mechanics of how we’re breathing often aren’t,’ he says.
‘If our breath isn’t flowing to its optimal standard then we’re not getting the required flow of air to our cells and we’re probably expelling more energy.
‘We also create more stress in the body because we have a shallower pattern of breathing. And there’s a knock-on effect which throws off the chemistry of our breath and we get trapped in these patterns.’
Sandeman is speaking from the Cotswolds, where he is about to spend several days con
‘I thought it was as simple as breathing in, breathing out’
ducting breathwork courses at various festivals. At 39 he glows with health and vitality and has a small nose ring and a permanent, charming smile. That too, it turns out, is down to breathing.
‘This physical process of air in air out is very heavily linked to how we feel,’ he says.
‘A feeling that lasts a week is a mood. A mood that lasts a couple of months or a year is a temperament. If it lasts multiple years we say it’s our personality.
‘It all comes from breathing patterns, these archetypes that we get trapped into.’
The notion that one’s personality can be dictated by how we breathe is a radical one, but Sandeman is rapidly accruing a legion of fans who believe he might just be on to something.
Certainly, the health benefits of good breathing are not in doubt. He cites the Framingham Heart Study, conducted in the US in the 1940s, which concluded that the greatest indicator of lifespan isn’t genes, diet or the amount of daily exercise we do, but lung capacity and respiratory health.
In his book, he includes breathing exercises for just about anything you can think of, from headaches to chronic pain, insomnia to better digestion, and insists we can all lead healthier, happier lives if we just learn to breathe the right way.
‘Life gets stressful sometimes, and we all go through experiences, especially in our modern, fastpaced world,’ he says.
‘We all stub our toes, bang our heads or go through pain, and breathing really helps in these areas. So it’s about making sure people have these skills in their tool belts so it can empower them in the moment to say, “I don’t have to feel this way. I can take a bit more control over how I feel.”’
A breathing session with Sandeman is like a double brandy on an empty stomach.
His soothing Scottish accent – he grew up in Edinburgh and now splits his time between the city and London – and his calm, measured tones are enough to leave me feeling like I’m drifting off, even though I’m sitting at my office desk.
‘Breathe in,’ he says in a calm voice. ‘And breathe out, letting it go, relaxing your shoulders but not collapsing them.’
As I do I feel more relaxed than I have in weeks, the sensation similar to the sort of thing you might spend a whole day at a spa and hundreds of pounds to experience.
Thousands of others have come to the same conclusion, so much so that Sandeman is rapidly becoming the nation’s number one breathing guru, a Joe Wicks for the soul, if you will.
Having set up Breathpod five years ago – primarily focused on teaching stressed-out executives how to breathe properly – during the first national lockdown he took to Instagram. There he held daily breathing sessions which attracted hundreds of housebound workers looking for an outlet in their unpredictable new world.
‘Everybody on the sessions just felt like they were there for a common goal, which was to feel a bit better and to have a better day that day,’ he says.
‘It became this really supportive, lovely community online. That was never really the plan or intention but it just formed that way.’
The sessions led to Sandeman being signed up by Radio 1, where he now presents an early morning show entitled the Decompression Session, where he interweaves breathing exercises with calming tunes for burnt-out millennials. The book last week reached number eight on the Sunday Times Bestsellers list.
It’s all a long way from Sandeman’s upbringing in Edinburgh, where he started training in judo at the age of four (he was a black belt by the age of 16 and is a former Scottish judo champion), owned a teddy bear named Tough Ted and had a poster of Rocky on his wall.
‘There’s this Scottish mentality of being strong and solid and being there for others which was drilled into me,’ he says. ‘I was doing martial arts by four years old when I could barely walk. I always thought it was a good thing, this notion of strength and being solid.
‘It wasn’t until I started to experience grief that all that changed.’
Before the age of 30 Sandeman lived – by his own admission – a charmed life. Having left school and studied maths at university he worked in finance in London, before quitting the corporate world to become a DJ.
With his Taiwanese American girlfriend Tiff, he travelled the world playing at festivals and nightclubs.
This magical, carefree existence lasted until one day in 2014, in a treatment room in a Los Angeles hospital, when Tiff was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer.
‘I always thought I could fix things,’ he says. ‘I thought we were going to beat cancer, I was going to prove everyone wrong. It was part of that strength, like being a judo player. Not taking the doc
‘It was like a lightbulb switched on’
tor’s words as gospel and saying let’s not listen to that diagnosis.’
Tiff died on Valentine’s Day 2016, aged just 32, and Sandeman’s world collapsed.
‘It was like the rug was pulled from beneath me. It was really, really hard. The way I experienced it was complete withdrawal.
‘I didn’t even want to get out of bed some days and that scared everyone around me, especially my family.’
Broke and devastated, Sandeman returned home to Edinburgh and found himself, at 33 years old, living with his parents. ‘I didn’t
want to speak to anybody because I didn’t want to show my vulnerability.
‘I knew I might be upset deep down, so I just locked myself away. I had a lot of guilt. I really felt like in some way it was my fault.
‘I’d say to myself, “I should have listened to that person, or why didn’t we try that”, as if it was my fault. Everything played out exactly as the doctor said it would but I didn’t listen to them because I didn’t want to accept it when tiff was alive, let alone when she passed away.’
Sandeman’s breakthrough moment came when, on Mother’s Day, he bought a last-minute gift for his Mum.
‘I needed to get something for her and about an hour beforehand something popped up online about a breathing workshop. We went the following week and I really just thought I was going there for her, I didn’t think anything of it.
‘And then, in that session, it was like a lightbulb switched on. It was very powerful. It pulled away all the armour I had. It was a huge shift.’
During that first session Sandeman sobbed his heart out, finally recognising the magnitude of his grief. Hooked, he started attending more workshops, learning about breathing and its myriad benefits, while healing his broken heart.
‘I worked through my grief using breath,’ he says.
‘I started to get more and more excited about the potential of using our breath to unpack parts of ourselves and release the parts that aren’t actually serving us any more.’
Breathpod was born the following year, tapping into the growing market for wellness, and he even appeared at Gwyneth Paltrow’s In Goop Health summit in London in 2019, giving breathing sessions to well-heeled yoga bunnies.
He says he welcomes sceptics, not least because he used to be one himself.
‘I think it’s important to question things,’ he says. ‘that’s what science is. Coming up with a question and then trying to figure out the answer.’
And certainly there is plenty of science in the book, albeit packaged in an accessible, userfriendly way.
The collapsed breather (that’s me, apparently) is one of many different types of breathers Sandeman identifies (others include the frozen breather, the reverse breather and the slightly worryingly named breath grabber) and there are fun facts too.
Most of us know that yawns are often contagious but beware, he says, of those who don’t ‘catch’ yawns from others. A study into psychopathic traits at Baylor University suggested that those who scored highly on the psychopathic scale were less likely to yawn as they showed less empathy.
Make no mistake though, some of Sandeman’s approaches are radical. He advocates nose breathing rather than mouth breathing for optimal health, and challenges readers to keep their mouths
‘I worked through grief using breath’
closed, even taping them up if it helps retrain them to breathe through their noses.
these days he runs Breathpod with his partner Nova, with whom he has found love again. In May he proposed while on a trip to the Isle of Skye.
‘She’s been so supportive,’ he says. ‘A lot of people would find it quite hard to be with someone who was still talking about their ex-girlfriend.
‘She’s been amazing because she realises that everything brings you to this point. We are in love and we wouldn’t be together without all the experiences that have come before.’
Back in our breathing session, Sandeman is telling me that my collapsed breathing may be the result of residual trauma from an accident I had many years ago. He prescribes ten days of breathing exercises and a practice called ‘infinity breathing’.
‘I want you to give your body permission to let that go,’ he tells me as I breathe out deeply. ‘It’s safe to let go.’ As I do, I feel as though a weight has been lifted. Perhaps I really have been doing this breathing thing wrong all along.
■ Breathe In, Breathe Out: Restore Your Health, Reset Your Mind and Find Happiness Through Breathwork by Stuart Sandeman is available now, priced £16.99