is Mouth Breathing making you sick?
You’re sitting at a table or worse you’re waiting to fall asleep, and quiet falls gently on the space and then all you can hear is the slightly disturbing sound of ones mouth breathing 😬 and it ain’t yours…the longer it goes on the more disturbed your mental state becomes ahhhh!!!
In most cases individuals are completely unaware that they are mouth breathing or they simply feel they can’t breath through their nose.
When you breathe through your mouth, the tongue sits in a slightly different position, as does the jaw,
which many people aren’t aware of but this can also lead to quite significant issues and changes in your facial structure, which has been researched.
Those of you who have young children and or teenagers, mouth breathing can start quite early on, and is rather common in children who’ve had recurring upper respiratory infections and asthma. If your children are mouth breathers eventually, they could develop issues with their teeth and jaw the earlier you catch this the better.
Of course addressing the underlying cause of the mouth breathing, allergies, asthma becomes paramount here. Consider looking into integrative medicine for helping with this.
health impacts of Mouth Breathing
Adults who breathe through their mouths are more likely to have symptoms like; sleep disorders, nausea, reduced productivity, low energy
and are more likely to report a worse quality of life than people who breathe through their noses.
The adverse consequences of mouth breathing are much greater in children, and it’s during these formative years that breathing mode begins and development of the orofacial systems and airways is taking place.
Here are some possible effects on mouth breathing:
Increased risk of snoring and sleep apnea.
Actual decrease in oxygenation of the cells and body.
TMJ pain and dysfunction
Malocclusion (position of teeth/jaw when mouth is closed)
Facial cranial changes.
Gingivitis
Enlarged tonsils and adenoids.
Some learning difficulties
Increase risk of asthma
Bad breath
Increased risk of gum disease and dental issues
Increased risk of cardiovascular disease
Temporomandibular joint issues
Headaches and pain
Chronic tonsillitis and adenoid issues
Why do you breathe through your mouth?
Athlete training
Athletes and or runners are trained by coaches to breath through the mouth, and this one is starting to see a little bit of pushback. A book called the “Athletes Oxygen Advantage” by Patrick McKeown is a great resource for those of you who are interested in reading more about breathing in sport and the benefits of shifting to mouth breathing.
They're now starting to train athletes with their mouths closed and equate this as being a similar in effect to altitude training. There is an intelligent sequence behind this form of training, so those of you who train please don’t be tempted to just throw yourself in and start nose breathing, you have to train yourself up to it.
Blocked Nasal Passages
If you have blocked nasal passages, and I get this a lot in clinic.
“I can't breathe through my nose.”
“I can't get enough oxygen through my nose.”
So in this case you may need further investigation.
Talk to your health practitioners or to your doctor about appropriate scans necessary to delve into this and get a clear picture of what’s going on in the nasal cavities.
If you’re not sure if it's a structural issue or if it's a habit, then it’s a simple experiment at different times of the day you want to keep your mouth closed and breathe through your nose. Try this in the morning and evening as well as after your shower and see if the issue of feeling blocked up improves or changes at all.
If you can breathe through your nose for 30 seconds to a minute, then the issue in your nose may not be so bad, and it could be more of a habitual thing that you're just used to breathing through your mouth. Habitual mouth breathing is actually very common.
If you keep your mouth closed and you try breathing through your nose, and you can't get to that 30 seconds or a minute, then there could be something structural. Best get it investigated.
Mouth Breathing and Anxiety
Anxiety is something to consider if you’re breathing through the mouth during the day.
A question I was recently asked by a client is can mouth breathing cause anxiety?
This is a chicken or egg question really…
Essentially ‘anxiety’ is a verb it’s a ‘doing’ word so there is a pattern and process that we run and refer to as anxiety and it just so happens that mouth breathing is part of this pattern for many.
In the naturopathic clinic I spend time training my clients on breathing with good success when it comes to anxiety.
Hyperventilation is actually common and I’m not referencing the full blown clinical hyperventilation we see in panic attacks but rather a milder increase in respiration rate, taking random deep breaths through the mouth, and lots of breaths over a one minute period. These are all parameters you can use to track your progress with your breathing and health.
The safest and most effective way to breathe in is through your nose.
When you mouth breathe the air that enters your mouth will dry it out. So best to check if you’re waking up with a dry mouth this is a giveaway that you’re probably mouth breathing during sleep.
You also want to start developing some awareness around when you're stressed, and if you’re more likely to mouth breathe and hyperventilate?
Why breathe through your nose?
So when you nose breathe, air goes into the nostrils and then it swirls around in the nasal turbinates, and several things happen here in the nasal cavity.
One, it filters the air. It takes all the bits and pieces out of the air that really shouldn't be getting into your lungs, it's also your first line of immune defence.
There has been research that shows mouth breathers tend to experience more respiratory infections and are also more likely to struggle with inflammation due to increased exposure to these particles in the air entering via the mouth.
Nose breathing also regulates the volume of air coming in and warms and moistens the air. It also creates nitric oxide, and helps to improve your diaphragmatic breathing. Fundamentally your blood chemistry changes when you breathe through the nose.
Diaphragmatic Breathing
In terms of the importance of breathing, a lot of the traditional texts we see in yoga discuss this concept that if the breath is disturbed, then the mind will also be disturbed and vice versa.
A stressed breath a stressed mind!
As we continue the discussion on proper breathing for health in following posts, you'll see some of the anatomy and physiology of what happens when we're breathing.
When you're working with your breathing exercises, you must understand that we're affecting the centers in the brain that are responsible for breathing. Your medulla oblongata and pons are the parts of the brain where there's a lot of activity in relation to the breath. When we're engaging in repetitive breath-work we’re shifting our body’s chemistry as well as our brain function. To learn more about stress and its impact on brain function check out this article.
I can’t stress enough the importance of proper, concise and consistent breath-work, I’ve seen time and time again health parameters shift, mental health improve and ‘chronic’ health conditions subside when corrective work was done with breathing.
Effects of Diaphragmatic Breathing
When we look at our different practices, for example, alternate nostril breathing, essentially what we're doing here is reducing the volume of breath moving in because we are occluding one nostril. We're only breathing a limited amount of air in, increasing carbon dioxide in the body.
But wait! You’re thinking why would we want to do that?
For my fellow geeks out there…Helpful to remember in order for oxygen to dissociate from its bound heme form and move into cells we need carbon dioxide levels to be at an optimum level. So when carbon dioxide increases a little we get oxygen releasing and moving into cells.
It's not uncommon that when we do a breath practice like alternate nostril breathing, we feel a little bit warmer and the face might flush a little bit, and the mouth even waters a little bit right? These are all normal things that start to signal shifts in the body.
Interestingly, when we're breathing through the left nostril, we're increasing subtly of course brain activity. Left side we have a strong connection with enhancing spatial performance.
When we're breathing through the right nostril, we're impacting left-brain activity, which is strongly linked with the vocal arrangement, and of course, we don’t have all the answers just yet because we need more research but breathing practices in yoga have a much more extensive impact than simply improving heart rate and blood pressure.
So, I don't want to go too deep into the techniques themselves here on the blog, I spend plenty of time on the online yoga platform covering much of the practicals and you have a complimentary 7 day pass for that so you can learn all of these for yourself.
For now, I want you to appreciate how vital it is that you re train yourself to breath through your mouth most of the time.
On a final note here, you may very well find that you struggle most with mouth breathing at night while you’re asleep. This is something I’ll discuss in more detail in future blog posts.
However for now become aware of a dry mouth in the morning as an indication that this could be a factor.
If you’d like individualised support with your breathing or general health and wellbeing please head across to the one to one page or fill out the form below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.