Your average person doesn't give a second thought to how they breathe. And why should they? It's not like how you breathe has an impact on your health and wellbeing, right?

Wrong! How you breathe has a surprisingly large impact on your oxygen absorption, dental health, and immunity.

Specifically, you may have heard that breathing through your nose (vs your mouth) is optimal. But why is that the case? What is the proper way to do it? Should you always breathe through your nose, even during exercise? What about mouth tape for sleep?

This article is meant to be your guide to nose breathing so you can reap the benefits as well.

Why is Nose Breathing Better than Mouth Breathing?

The nose and mouth both act as a pathway to get air into your throat and down into your lungs. That might leave you thinking that both methods are essentially the same.

However, the anatomy of your nasal cavity and sinuses are quite different than that of your mouth, having very different effects on the air as it travels in and down.

Nose breathing

The nasal cavity is designed for breathing. It has intricate structures and membranes that perform specific functions to optimize breathing.

Though it's hard to imagine, your nasal cavity and sinuses occupy a space about the size of your fist behind your nose, eyes, and cheek bones. You can almost think of it as a preliminary lung that conditions air before sending it down to your real lungs.

Your nasal cavity does this preconditioning by:

Filtering out particles: The little hairs and mucus membranes in your nose capture pollen, bacteria, and other pollutants before they get down into your lungs. It is even thought that your nose acts as the first step in building immunity towards new pathogens.

Producing nitric oxide: Your nose releases nitric oxide (NO) as you breathe. NO is able to expand your blood vesicles and allow for the better uptake and transportation of oxygen throughout your body.

Humidifying the air: Your nose helps warm and moisten the air coming in, allowing your lungs to use it faster.

With all those benefits, it should seem clear why breathing through your nose is optimal. But how does it differ from mouth breathing?

Mouth breathing

Without trying to state the obvious here, your mouth's primary function is to chew food and talk. Because of this, it lacks the features that the nasal cavity does and does not provide the same benefits for breathing.

In fact, breathing though the mouth regularly can lead to:

• Asthma
• Bad breath
• Tooth decay and gingivitis
• Sleep apnea

This alone should make you more self-aware of how you breathe.

How to Start Nose Breathing

Breathing through your nose sounds simple enough, but it can be hard to do consistently, especially after years of mouth breathing.

Several times a day, draw your attention to your breath and run though this checklist:

1. Comfortably close your jaw so your teeth are touching and aligned.
2. Make sure your lips are closed as well.
3. Have your tongue occupy the whole space of your mouth cavity. Check that your tongue is touching the roof of your mouth all the way across the top.
4. Focus drawing in air from your belly by expanding your bellow outwards. This will pull down on the diaphragm and draw in air.
5. Control your breath on the inhale and exhale, making each last at least five seconds.
6. Do this for 10 cycles.

(Belly breathing - or diaphragmatic breathing - has a number of benefits for mood regulation and even digestion. Make sure you're pulling in from your stomach rather than having your collar bone and shoulders move up and down with each breath).

Drawing your attention to nose breathing several times a day over the course of a week or two should start to get you in the habit.

There are many other breathing exercises from yoga and other cultures you can do to start to build the habit as well.

Nose Breathing and Aerobic Exercise

Nose breathing should be your default breathing pattern throughout the day and even while you sleep.

During aerobic exercise, however, it has been debated whether nose breathing will get you optimal performance. The studies that have been conducted have a very limited sample set, and more studies would need to be done to give a conclusive answer.

One 2017 study with nine individuals showed that nasal breathing vs mouth breathing did not have an effect on power output or performance on a Wingate Anaerobic cycle test. It was noted that mouth breathing caused a higher breathe rate, but nose breathing was shown to increase heart rate and thus put more strain on the heart. Oxygen consumption was equal across both.

Another study in 2018 had similar findings, though it did not note an increase in heart rate for nose breathing.

Despite the lack of hard evidence, many will say that nose breathing is optimal during exercise. It is said that it helps prevent dehydration, bronchial constriction and asthma, and engages the diaphragm more effectively. This is in-line with the already well-known benefits of mouth breathing, though it has not been shown to have a notable effect on athletic performance.

Here's my conclusion from all this: There isn't strong evidence (yet) to say that nose breathing will increase your athletic performance, but it might be worth doing during training because of the general benefits already known about nose breathing. However, if you're in competition mode, all of that goes out the window! Do what's most comfortable for you.

Nose Breathing, Sleep, and Mouth Tape

The benefits of nose breathing and the downsides of mouth breathing extends to sleep as well. In addition, mouth breathing during sleep causes a narrowing of the upper airway, which can decrease air flow and exacerbate existing obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).

But keeping your mouth shut during your sleep is pretty difficult to train.

You may have seen a trend on social media of people taping their mouths shut while they sleep (using a special type of tape). This obviously encourages nose breathing and the benefits we talked about earlier, but people have even claimed better skin health and less brain fog though there is no hard data to support this.

Some limited studies have shown mouth taping's ability to reduce some symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea, but the data isn't very extensive. On top of that, some medical professionals see it as potentially dangerous due to its obstruction of airways.

From everything I have studied, here is my guidance on mouth tape:

• If you have sleep apnea or suspect sleep apnea, talk to your ear, nose, and throat doctor to see if mouth taping could be a good option. But do not do this without their guidance first!
• If you mouth breathe but do not have sleep apnea or snore, specialty mouth tape could be a good option, but it's still best to talk to your doctor first.
• If you don't breathe through your mouth during your sleep right now, there isn't much benefit to getting mouth tape.

If you're looking to improve your sleep in other ways, read our complete guide to getting better sleep.

Conclusion

Nose breathing has some well-known benefits from protection against pathogens, increasing oxygen absorption, and better dental health. That being said, there is still a lot we don't know about its impact on exercise and the safety/efficacy of mouth tape during sleep.

Simply start by training yourself to breathe through your nose during the day with the exercises given above, and let us know what benefits you start to see!