Mouth breather v nose breather
Mouth breather v Nose breather
A simple tale
I come at this battle from having been on both sides
For many years I was a mouth breather and exalted in that being the way to breathe, even though I did not know any different.
I distinctly remember taking a big breath in through my mouth when I was much younger and marvelling as to the power I felt.
For many years, anytime I felt I needed a little boost of energy, I opened that gaping cavern in my head and drank as much air as I could, licking my lips at the seductive nature of the energy as it tickled my insides and allowed me to do….whatever it was I was doing then, climb trees, play football, that sort of thing.
As I got older, quite a bit older actually, I had two children. 35 years old for my first, 38 years old for my second.
Now then, anyone who has had children and changed the interminable number of nappies they get through will know. The stench that comes from the inside of your child is one of previous unknown horror.
I do not wish to go into too many details as, the parents amongst us can bore others rigid of the magnitude of such anal deliveries, however, I am about to do precisely that.
There is something unholy about the texture of near diarrhoea. Just firm enough to smear its own fetid moisture from the initial aperture, up the back, embracing underneath both armpits and gathering onto the chest, up the neck and into the hair, where the delicate greeny/brown mix, gave my beloved devil child, little dirty rat tails.
This is precisely what is needed at 3am when your child is crying through their utter bewilderment as to what has just completely rocked their small body, bathing them, feeding them, belching them and trying to get them back to sleep. All the while the mouth breathing is keeping you awake, just to stop you upchucking all over your child’s head.
That would be a detrimental petty revenge. Come on, none us would ever think, through the mind numbing tiredness, that would remotely be a good idea….would we? Would we!
This is where our appreciation of mouth breathing reaches its apotheosis.
I smelt that putrescence once and wanted to cry and needed my mummy.
This all meant of course, that my mouth breathing helped to form a habit.
A habit which saw me live the next five years, with the birth of my daughter in a state of extreme fatigue and balanced with a permanently accelerated fight or flight response.
The perfect paradox of normal and not normal all at the same time.
We now come onto the element where my breathing began to change.
I started to do tai chi.
I was told to breathe through my nose. I asked why and was told it keeps the power in your body.
I was too new and callow to question this and ask them to explain why, and just began to slowly change my breathing.
It took a while as I had to get rid of the congestion that my brain had factored into my nostrils. I also discovered that my voice began to change when I started to nose breathe as opposed to mouth breathe. More sonorous and less reedy.
When I began to investigate the reasons why I should ‘keep the power in’, I began to realise how the different breathing techniques changed how we felt.
For those reading this, who may think, well I am alright, and I breathe through my mouth, please let me be a little more precise on my assertions.
We ALL breathe through our mouths. Definitely when we are communicating, when we eat, when we drink and that is normal, that is what we are supposed to be doing.
It is outside of those moments when we are not doing those things, or indeed breathing techniques, like conscious connected breathing, when mouth breathing can be a definitive boost to finding things out within the mind.
Indeed, it is the every day and night breathing through our mouth which begins to land us with a few issues.
Mouth breathing keeps our sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight or freeze), in a heightened state. Which is ok when that is what we need, not quite so good when we need to sleep properly and have a sense of calm.
Breathing through the mouth creates an imbalance in the lungs. The oxygen only goes halfway down the lungs. The blood flow, being heavier moves to the bottom of the lungs. Signals are then sent to the brain that something is awry. The brains defence to this is to release a little cortisol and adrenaline to deal with that stress. ‘Hey fellas, get a load of this, this will sort you out’. Like a low rent neighbourhood drug dealer your brain is oblivious to the long-term effect low-key shots of stress relief can have on the internal organs.
In a short-term way this is absolutely the right solution, after all, it is all we have. However, when that low-key stress relief becomes the norm, then like every habit, we tend to need more just to feel ok.
This, over time spins us into a negative spiral of mind and body self-loathing.
It does not take much to realise I am now about to counteract the mouth breathing ne’er do well escapades, with the righteous and healthier nose breathing.
It took me a little while to understand this.
Keeping the power in, means breathing efficiently. Knowing each nasal breath, no matter how small will reach the 500M alveoli at the bottom of our lungs, which I vaguely remember from my school biology class.
When this happens, the gas diffusion of oxygen and carbon dioxide within the alveoli is at its efficient best. The carbon dioxide acts as a vasodilator for the blood vessels, dilating them to allow more oxygen rich blood to flow into the heart and is then pumped round the vascular system giving us energy.
Don’t forget, your brain needs 20% of oxygen at any given time, so if you are not breathing with efficiency and you are starting to feel a little brain fog, breathe nasally with purpose.
This is of course a very simplistic view on what happens, and if a heart and lung doctor read this, they would roll their eyes at the simplicity.
But we need simple explanations, we need to understand on a base and fundamental level what we can do to make us feel better.
As a simple comparison, take a big breath through the mouth and then release through the mouth. Then take a deep breath through the nose and then release through the nose.
Which one felt better?
The words big and deep were deliberately used.
When you breathe through your nose, you warm the air as you breathe in, the cilia hairs are anti-viral and bacterial and protect you from germs. This does not happen when you breathe through the mouth.
Each nasal breath goes into the lungs and moves the diaphragm, which is part of our core. It does not move the diaphragm when you mouth breathe.
Our nostrils are the right size for the inhalations and exhalations we need, big exercise notwithstanding, (and that is a whole other blog).
The more we exhale through our mouth, the more CO2 we get rid of. We need this, this is our power. This helps to control our nervous systems and the way we nasally breathe can make us feel how we wish to feel. Which means calm as well as on high alert.
We control this when we nasally breathe, we do not when we mouth breathe.
When you nose breathe, and you wish to calm, you just gently exhale with a longer out breath. This slows down the heart, sends signals to the brain that all is ok and within 90 seconds you can begin to feel more at peace.
Can you with your mouth? No sir, you cannot.
I feel, the person who knows nothing about breath work, would be starting to get the picture as to what is better or worse.
Rule of thumb should be on an everyday basis, breathe through your nose. If for whatever reason, you begin to feel too much air hunger, (build-up of CO2), breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, it gets rid of the CO2 more quickly as it is a bigger aperture.
If things are really bad in the air hunger stakes, ie you are walking up a really steep hill, breathe in and out through the mouth. When you reach the top, take as many breaths as you need in and out through the nose to regulate your breathing once again.
You will recover and feel better more quickly.
Same principle when you are changing a baby’s nappy or enter a public urinal. Breathe in and out through the mouth if the putrid stench is too much, once that baby is happy once more and smelling fresher, or you are back onto the shockingly polluted streets, breathe back through the nose, it is the original filter.
Happy breathing one and all.