Bondi Wave Journal
Roderick Gadaev
Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is best known as the host of the Huberman Lab podcast, one of the world's most popular health and fitness shows, where he translates complex science into actionable, zero-cost protocols for improving sleep, focus, physical performance, and overall longevity.
Two systems run in the background of everything you do: the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight, alertness, output) and the parasympathetic nervous system (rest-and-digest, recovery, calm). Your breath is one of the few dials that talks directly to both.
Nasal breathing engages the diaphragm more fully than mouth breathing does. Full diaphragmatic breaths stimulate the vagus nerve — the primary communication line to the parasympathetic system — which lowers heart rate and shifts the body toward a calmer, more regulated state. Mouth breathing, especially shallow chest-breathing under stress, does the opposite: it keeps the sympathetic system engaged, heart rate elevated, and the nervous system on alert even when there's nothing left to be alert about.
There's a second mechanism worth knowing: nitric oxide. It's produced in the nasal passages and, when air passes through the nose, gets carried down into the lungs alongside it. Nitric oxide is a vasodilator — it widens blood vessels — which means nasally-filtered air improves how efficiently oxygen actually gets absorbed into the bloodstream once it reaches the lungs. Mouth breathing bypasses this step completely. Same air, same lungs, meaningfully different physiological outcome.
And a third: nasal breathing naturally slows respiration rate and increases exhale length relative to inhale. Longer exhales are one of the most reliable, well-documented ways to activate the parasympathetic system on demand — which is part of why breathwork protocols built around extended exhales (physiological sighs, box breathing, etc.) work as fast as they do.
During the day:
Notice your resting breath. If your mouth is open and you're not actively speaking or exercising at high intensity, close it. This alone, done consistently, retrains baseline breathing mechanics over a period of weeks.
Under acute stress:
Use a physiological sigh — two inhales through the nose (a short top-off breath stacked on top of a normal one), followed by a long, slow exhale through the mouth. This is one of the fastest tools available for down-regulating sympathetic activation in real time, and it works because of the exhale-length mechanism above.
During training:
Nasal breathe for as much of your warm-up and lower-intensity work as you can tolerate. It's harder — that's the point. It's a low-grade respiratory constraint that trains CO2 tolerance over time, which is part of what improves breathing efficiency and delays the point at which you feel out of breath during harder efforts.
At night:
This is where most people lose the plot without realising it. Once you're asleep, there's no conscious override left — if your mouth falls open, it stays open, for hours, every night, compounding the sympathetic-leaning effects described above right when your body is supposed to be doing its deepest recovery work. Snoring, dry mouth on waking, and non-restorative sleep despite adequate hours are common downstream signs of this.
This is the specific gap a nasal strip is built to close. It's not a nervous-system hack on its own — it's a mechanical assist that keeps the nasal airway open enough that nasal breathing stays the path of least resistance all night, instead of the mouth taking over the moment muscle tone drops during sleep. Bondi Wave exists for exactly that window: the hours where willpower isn't available to enforce the habit, so the mechanics have to do it instead.
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Nasal breathing isn't a wellness trend — it's a direct, physiologically-grounded input into which branch of your nervous system is running the show at any given moment. Awake, it's trainable through attention and specific techniques like the physiological sigh. Asleep, it needs a mechanical solution, because attention isn't available. Handle both, and you're not just breathing better — you're giving your nervous system a cleaner signal to work with, all day and all night.
