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Three more good reasons to breathe through your nose and not your mouth.

July 7, 2014 by info@breathingremedies.co.uk 8 Comments

SAM_1244 SAM_1250

 

 

And some showy pink.

 

One of my earlier blog posts focused on the importance of nasal breathing (rather than mouth breathing) for good health. I gave you seven reasons, and I think it is about time for a few more – here are three good ones:

1) Nasal breathing is good for head and neck stability and strength.

The tongue is a very strong muscle and when it is pressed into the roof of the closed mouth and the head stays balanced at the top of the neck, and the ribcage is stacked above the pelvis there is great strength and stability (right hand image). If the nose is bypassed, and the mouth is open to breathe through, with the tongue away from the roof off the mouth, the head tends to jut forward to keep the airway open, the neck and shoulder and jaw muscles can be strained and the ribcage position compensates so vertical stacking over the pelvis is lost. This leads to a postural instability, inefficiency and muscular strain, TMJ (jaw problems), and poor breathing control (left hand image). Closing the mouth helps get the head, shoulders, neck, jaw and ribcage back in position and takes the strain and effort out of breathing.mouth breather

I am learning more and more how important posture can be not just for breathing but for all of the body’s functions.  To be continued…, watch this space…!

 

2) Nasal breathing helps to set the breathing pattern or rhythm.

There are sensors in the nasal cavity that not only detect odours in the environment, but also the temperature of the air and the flow of the air coming in. The environment is continually monitored and breathing is automatically changed to suit the changing environment. Breathing in cold air can reduce breathing rate, a good adaptation to keep warm and to keep blood circulating to the extremities. Mouth breathing would override this mechanism, so losing one control mechanism.

3) Mouth breathers have lower CO2 in their systems, therefore lower oxygen in their cells.

This is the  really important topic of unbalanced blood gases, and one of the main factors in chronic hyperventilation;  lowered CO2 levels (hypocapnia) have widespread consequences from tightened airways (broncho-constriction) to narrowed blood vessels (cold hands and poor circulation) and poor oxygen availability (brain fog etc). On its own this is a massive topic so I will just point you to a list of symptoms linked to over breathing and low CO2 (hypocapnia or carbon dioxide syndrome) and go into more detail in future posts.

In the case of CO2 levels, nose breathing is best because a) the pathway from lung to fresh air is a bit longer, increasing the “dead space” and that b) the airways resistance is a bit higher when nasal breathing. Both these factors can help keep CO2 levels up (I won’t go into the whys and wherefores here).

Are you convinced? Try breathing through your nose, pace yourself so that you can breathe through your nose ALL the time, even when climbing stairs or walking uphill. It doesn’t matter if you have to slow down for now. Let me know how you get on, you may be surprised!

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Filed Under: hyperventilation, Nose breathing is important

Comments

  1. Devi says

    November 18, 2014 at 08:29

    Dear doctor,
    I have been diagnosed with early stage of fibrosis .i cough a lot. How can you help me . Will breathing through the nose help?
    Thank you
    Devi

    Reply
    • info@breathingremedies.co.uk says

      December 1, 2014 at 22:25

      I am sorry that you are suffering with fibrosis. Gentle nasal breathing could help. Try to pace yourself so that you can breathe through the nose all the time.

      Reply
  2. Barrie Marshall says

    September 15, 2016 at 19:53

    Hi Janet, Barrie here, just a short comment, since I started conscious nasal breathing my posture has improved dramatically, it was only yesterday I looked in the mirror and my shoulders looked strong, I tried to improve them by trying to pull my shoulders back like I used to, I couldn’t move them back at all.

    Reply
  3. Janet says

    September 15, 2016 at 21:14

    Thanks for the update Barrie, you are going from strength to strength with the nasal breathing!

    Reply
  4. Barrie says

    November 9, 2017 at 22:46

    Hi Janet, my nasal breathing day and night is now normal, a lot of improvements that you know happens, here is one that is not mentioned but it’s intetesting, I know my speech has improved, recently I tried doing tongue twisters, a massive improvement, this is obviously with my tongue being on my upper palette for over twelve months something had changed!

    Reply
    • info@breathingremedies.co.uk says

      December 20, 2017 at 19:37

      Thank you for sharing this Barrie, yes tongue position is important as well as nasal breathing. And we don’t get taught this stuff!

      Reply
  5. Barrie says

    March 20, 2019 at 01:39

    Interesting as always, just to be uninteresting, the tongue is not one muscle it is eight muscles.

    Reply
    • info@breathingremedies.co.uk says

      May 9, 2019 at 21:08

      You are correct about the eight muscles in the tongue. And hopefully not tongue-tied!

      Reply

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About me, Buteyko breathing educator

Janet Winter breathing and posture educator (Buteyko and Egoscue)

Dr Janet Winter (PhD)

Hello, I am Janet,  a  Breathing educator (Buteyko), and Posture specialist (Egoscue).

I help people recover from asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety, sleep problems, headaches, IBS chronic fatigue (ME/CFS) and more, by improving their dysfunctional breathing.

Listen to a client’s (Suzy Glaskie, functional medicine health coach at Peppermint Wellness) 15 minute podcast on how Buteyko helped her.

I teach natural health control with no drugs, gadgets or manipulation. You can sign up to my newsletter here.

Phone me 01663 743055 (Dr Janet Winter) or contact me here.

What I do

Breathing education gently retrains a disordered breathing pattern and helps people naturally recover from breathing-related health problems.

The Buteyko Method relieves asthma symptoms, and has been listed in the UK Asthma Guideline since 2008.
I am a member of the Buteyko Breathing Educators Association and am fully insured.

I am also a qualified postural alignment specialist (PAS) Egoscue method. Good posture is essential for good breathing and proper function in general.

My background

I was involved in healthcare/biomedical research for 30 years although previously in a very different role: before training as a Breathing educator, I spent 20 years in drug discovery looking for new painkillers for a major pharmaceutical company based in a London Institute.
I worked as a neuroscientist and cell biologist, directing a team of bench scientists. (So I am not a medical doctor but I have a PhD in Neuroscience) I authored or co-authored more than 50 journal articles and reviews on my research.  My professional profile can be seen here on LINKEDIN.

Why I became a breathing educator

If you are reading this because you have CFS/ME, I know what you are going through. I know what it is like to hold onto a job by my fingernails, worried about how we would feed the family if I lost my job, come home and eat and sleep and spend my weekend recovering.

I had no social life. I was lucky to quickly get to a consultant who diagnosed me with candidiasis, and anti-fungals and a yeast and sugar-free diet helped a lot, but not enough.

I felt I had been “written off” and had nothing to offer. I was a mum, partner and employee with massively reduced physical and mental output compared with previously.
For me (after trying many different avenues, cranial osteopathy, chiropractic, mercury amalgam filling removal and more – I became a “fat-folder patient”).

How I got sick

I suspected my symptoms were “stress related” but they did not ease when I left my stressful job and moved out of London to the countryside.

Looking back on my history I can clearly see my own physical and emotional stresses accumulating, from a very traumatic bereavement, on-going work and family stresses, then a really bad summer respiratory infection and cough that was not shifted by two different antibiotics (but they probably contributed to unbalancing my gut flora, hence the fungal overgrowth/candidiasis).

A cough seems to be one of the best ways to mess up your breathing pattern, and many of my clients tell me “I was fine until I had that cough/chest infection, and I never really got my health back!!”

The breathing centre in the brain gets to think that big volume breathing is normal and unless you know about it, it is sometimes hard to recover. Luckily you CAN retrain your breathing by doing a series of gentle exercises and making some life style changes, and you CAN have hope of better health.

My recovery

Changing my breathing back to a more normal pattern really helped me. It was a big missing piece of my health puzzle, and one I had frankly never considered. One definition of stress is “anything that makes you breathe more”. And I know now that breathing too much can actually deplete the body of oxygen. And stress can be emotional or physical.

So that is why I do what I do and why I am passionate about it; I found a way to improve my chronic fatigue by better breathing and I trained as a breathing educator so I could help others with this devastating disease. There is so little help out there for them (you?).

Then chronic backache made good breathing impossible, and I discovered postural alignment therapy (Egoscue) to help with that. And I am still amazed at the progress I am making -it’s wonderful to have decreased pain and increased function when I had accepted decline at my age was inevitable. It’s not!


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