The dangers of mouth breathing - And why I tried mouth taping for a week

12/4/2022

If you saw the first season of Stranger Things, you probably remember that the first smear word that Mike taught Eleven was mouth-breather. But why is that a smear word in the first place? In this post, we investigate the differences between nose breathing and mouth breathing, and why we might prefer the former.

Breathing through your mouth vs your nose

Breathing is something that we rarely think about. It’s a bodily mechanism that happens autonomously and subconsciously. Something that we think about on even rarer occasions is whether we breathe through our nose or mouth at any given time. Most people breathe through their noses naturally, which is the preferred way to breathe. But some people are born with conditions that force them to become mouth breathers or develop a mouth-breathing habit later in life. Mouth breathing can lead to several health conditions in long run.

Symptoms of mouth breathing

It could be hard to know if you are mouth breathing or not, especially at night. Some common symptoms of mouth breathing include:

Dry mouth
Snoring
Bad breath
Feeling tired upon awakening

So what’s the reason behind mouth breathing? A common issue is obstruction of the nasal airways due to for example allergies, nasal polyps (unwanted growth of tissue), tumors, or genetic abnormalities that affect your nose and nasal airways. There can also be other medical conditions that can cause mouth breathing. One such condition is sleep apnea, which I write more about in my post on sleep apnea. When an apnea episode occurs, your breathing stops momentarily. This can cause panic in the brain, leading to a loud snore as your body gasps for air. Such events can develop a habit of mouth breathing as they provide a lot of oxygen.

Why nose breathing is superior

There seems to be a consensus around the fact that nose breathing is superior to mouth breathing. But why is that the case? Well, it all starts with how the air we breathe is processed. When breathing through your nose, the air is processed differently than when breathing through your mouth. Nose breathing induces:

Temperature control. The lungs are quite picky when it comes to the temperature of the air it wants. Nose breathing will function like climate control and warm up or cool down the air that comes in to a temperature that the lungs prefer.
Filtering of toxins. There are small, hair-like structures called cilia in your nose that filter out toxins and other debris and prevent them from reaching the lungs. This is not the case when breathing through your mouth.
Humidification. When breathing through your nose, the air will be humidified. This is why you rarely have a dry mouth when nose breathing, but very commonly when mouth breathing.
Increased airflow. Nose breathing leads to increased airflow to arteries, veins, and nerves.
Slower breathing. Breathing through your nose will in most cases lead to a slower and more relaxed breathing rhythm.

The dangers of mouth breathing

Breathing through your mouth consistently can have several long-term consequences. Plausible complications include, but are not limited to:

Gum disease and tooth decay. Mouth breathing takes a toll on your overall dental health. For example, mouth breathing will dry out much of the saliva. This is not optimal, since the saliva fills a very important self-cleaning function.
Physical changes (primarily in children). For example, an elongated face, a forward open bite, and dark spots under the eyes can result from mouth breathing in children.
Behavior problems (primarily in children). Studies show that children who breathe through their mouths have an increased likelihood of developing conditions like ADHD.
Bad breath. Again, mouth breathing dries out the saliva, which affects the breath negatively as well.
Sleep apnea and other sleep disorders. People who breathe through their mouth are more likely to develop sleep apnea and other sleep disorders, as I write about in my post on sleep apnea.
Increased blood pressure and pulse. Mouth breathing is associated with increased stress on the body, for example, increased blood pressure and pulse.

Mouth breathing remedies

The suggested treatments for mouth breathing vary depending on if you’re an adult och a child. When you’re young, it’s easier to remedy mouth breathing through surgical procedures that open up your airways. It’s possible to remove swollen or infected adenoids and repair deviated septums as potential remedies for mouth breathing in children. It’s also beneficial to try and keep the nose as clean and congestion-free as possible to make nose breathing as effortless as possible. Trying different breathing exercises that emphasize conscious nose breathing is also something worth trying. Another, rather non-clinical remedy to nose-breathing, is mouth taping at night. This simply means that you put a piece of tape over your mouth when you go to sleep to make it physically more challenging to breathe through your mouth.

My experience with mouth breathing

I have been a mouth breather for large parts of my life. Dental problems have played a significant role from an early age. I have had to extract about 10 teeth, where maybe only two or three were baby teeth. This means my mouth was too small to hold all the teeth the human body was designed to carry. This is the big culprit behind my development of the mouth breathing habit. This in turn has led to even more dental issues, such as cavities and tooth displacements. I had to carry braces for several years, but they did not help much. I got them at a very late stage when I was about 18, which I to this day still can’t fathom. It becomes exponentially harder to fix these types of issues with age.

I tried mouth taping for a week to remedy mouth breathing

Anyways, during the last year or so, since I learned about the dangers of mouth breathing, I have had in the back of my mind that I should try to do something about this habit of mouth breathing. In the plethora of health-related podcasts and youtube channels that I consume, I came across a common theme: They all talked about mouth-taping. So I figured I’d try it for a week to see what happened. Every night for seven days, I put a small piece of surgical tape over my mouth. The results were quite good. For most days, I woke up with a lot less dryness in my mouth. There were a couple of days that I still woke up with a dry mouth, but compared to the days with no tape, the dryness was still improved. My sleep quality did not really improve, but that’s maybe to be expected for such a short experiment. During the first couple of days, the tape felt quite uncomfortable, but towards the end of my experiment, I barely noticed it. Mouth taping is probably not something that I will do every day from here on out, but it’s a treatment that I will reach for from time to time when I feel like my mouth breathing is getting the best of me.