Mouth breathers: Listen up!

 I was alerted by my sister and daughter to a new book called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. One key point is the importance of breathing through your nose and not your mouth. I had no idea that mouth-breathing was so commonplace and so bad for you. I’ve always breathed through my nose, I so never thought much about it.

Your nose is designed for breathing and for maintaining your health. Trillions of air molecules pass through your nose in a single breath. Specialized bones and cilia filter out pollutants and keep the air moving. By heating, cleaning, and pressurizing air, the structures in your nose can extract more oxygen with each breath. Mouth breathing does not do these things,

“Mouthbreathing transforms airways for the worse. Inhaling air through the mouth decreases pressure, which causes the soft tissues in the back of the mouth to become loose and flex inward, creating less space and making breathing more difficult. Mouthbreathing begets more mouthbreathing. Inhaling from the nose has the opposite effect. It forces air against all those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and breathing easier. After a while, these tissues and muscles get ‘toned’ to stay in this opened and wide position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal breathing.”

Mouth-breathing causes snoring and sleep apnea. It also causes your body to lose 40 percent more water than nose breathing. Rats who had their nostrils obstructed developed fewer brain cells and took twice as long to make their way through a maze than the nasal-breathing control group. And so on. The author learned that after 240 hours of having his nostrils plugged by a researcher, his stress-related hormones spiked, he developed a bacterial infection in his nose, and his blood pressure increased.

The author and other experts recommend taping your lips together at night to train yourself to breathe through your nose (just a little square will do it). My sister, who is 86, has been working on eliminating mouth breathing. Here’s what she wrote to me: “I taped my mouth for two or three naps, and then it seemed to catch on. Now I just try to remember all day. At night I try to sleep with nose breathing and it’s only partially successful, but I wake up without the awful congestion with lots of phlegm. I’m more comfortable both night and day. When I must do something that takes concentration, I forget to nose-breathe. An interesting experiment.” At another point she writes, “It’s so nice to be able to go on an errand, eat out, and visit friends without having to rest constantly.” My daughter reports that she’s sleeping better and her blood pressure has gone down. Wow! I urge all you mouth breathers to buy the book and get going!

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