What If Breathing Through Your Nose Improves Your Health and Sleep?

Did you know that the healthiest populations on Earth train their children to breathe through their nose, rather than their mouth?

While your mouth is a breathing backup system, because we need air 24-7 our whole lives--research is showing that people who breathe through their nose may have a lot more energy and better performance exercising.

What if it could resolve insomnia, sexual dysfunction, sleep apnea, snoring, and even dental decay?

It's not hard to do. It just takes a little mindfulness during the day, and maybe a minor intervention at night. Some people put a piece of tape over their mouth, to sleep at night. (I did this every night for a month.)

What if you find you no longer wake up during the night, and don’t wake up dehydrated, or quit snoring? Using the nose for what it was designed for may be corrective in countless health issues, and may even make weight loss easier.

Behind the protuberance on your face, the nose is a complex system the size of a softball. It filters the air of pathogens and makes corrections in gases as it goes through various parts of the sinuses.

I’m keeping a log of my own tape experiment. Day 1, I woke up 6 hours later, as I usually do, and the tape was off my mouth.

Maybe that blue masking tape you use to identify flaws in a paint job when you build a house is the wrong kind to use. Some people get special tape. I put the tape back on and woke up two hours later and it was still on.

All of that is my typical night, minus the tape. But I will say that the tape didn’t bother me at all, though I’d thought it would.

I’d already practiced breathing through my nose with my mouth closed that whole day, including when I worked out. I felt great.

Later, I started using duct tape, which stays on all night. I don’t really know how to explain why I actually like wearing tape on my mouth all night. Even though I was initially afraid of it.

Maybe because with tape on my mouth, I know I’m breathing through my nose, which gives me some sense of satisfaction.

This book, Breath, has over 25K reviews on Amazon, and it’s worth the read, though I’m giving you the cliff’s notes here.

The author, James Nestor, was in very poor health and enrolled in a study where he and another subject’s noses were plugged for 10 days.

All their biomarkers tanked, mouth breathing, and they were really struggling and in rapidly declining health.

Then, in the study, their mouths were covered for 10 days, forcing them to use their noses to breathe.

Everything improved. They came alive again, and one of the study participants went from over 50 sleep apnea incidents during the night, to zero.

Blood pressure came down for both participants remarkably, and countless other measures of their health noticeably and measurably improved.

Give the book a read, or try breathing only through your nose, and taping your mouth at night.

I’d love to hear from you about how this goes for you, if you give it a try.

I also did a short video about mouth taping and included info about my two favorite breathwork techniques.

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