Do you sound like this when you sleep? Are you a mouth breather? Do you have obstructive sleep
apnea? If you've seen people taping their mouth online and you're wondering can mouth taping
be helpful for your breathing problem, for your sleep, can it improve the quality and the quantity
of your sleep? This video is for you. Hey, my name is Lucas. I am a yoga teacher and a breathing
coach. I originally trained in classic yoga pranayama but I went on later to study the Buteyko
method and that's where this mouth taping comes from. In this video today we'll talk about the
history of mouth taping and the Buteyko method, how it might be relevant for you, we'll talk
about why it's important to breathe through your nose, not your mouth, especially when you sleep.
And lastly, we'll take a look at how to do mouth taping correctly and maybe even more interesting
some alternatives to mouth taping that I find a lot more practical and a lot easier to comply with
long term. A quick disclaimer here: if you have severe asthma, if you have sleep apnea or COPD,
any major respiratory challenge, please go see a doctor. This video is for educational purposes
only. OK, so Buteyko method, mouth taping, what is all of this about? Where did this come from? Dr
Konstantin Buteyko was a Ukrainian medical doctor. He passed away in 2003, but way back in the 1950s
he developed a methodology he named after himself, the Buteyko method, that can really be summed up
with slow, gentle breathing through your nose, designed to normalize our breathing rate and
to increase our CO2. All of that sounds very counterintuitive, but what Dr Buteyko discovered
is that most of us over-breathe, we breathe too much, in the same way most of us overeat
and most of us over-stress. By normalizing our breathing rate, which means slow it down, and by
prioritizing nose versus mouth breathing, we can optimize our oxygen absorption in our body and we
can also help with a lot of different respiratory challenges, asthma in particular. The Buteyko
method continues to be used all the way up until today, specifically with asthmatics, and if you're
wondering why haven't I ever heard of this, that sounds very simple and very practical, part of the
reason is Dr Buteyko and many of his students made exaggerated health claims. They got really excited
about this slow, gentle breathing, about taping your mouth, about increasing CO2, and normalizing
breathing rate, that they started to make claims that if you master this technique you'd only need
four or five hours of sleep a night. They made claims that you could reverse diabetes and cure
heart disease. When these teachers exaggerate, it makes it very easy for the mainstream and
alternative healthcare practitioners just to ignore all of this altogether, because it sounds
like a bunch of crazy talk. However, it's not crazy at all. The Buteyko method, mouth taping,
slowing, normalizing your breathing can be very, very helpful, whether you're asthmatic or not,
whether you have chronic sleep apnea or you're just snoring a little bit, it can be really,
really helpful. OK, so why nose breathing versus mouth breathing? Who really cares? It's going in
the same pipe anyway, it doesn't really matter, right? Wrong. It makes a big, big difference.
Here's what you need to remember - our nose is for breathing and our mouth is for eating, exercise,
and talking. I'll say that again. Your nose is for breathing and your mouth is for eating,
and exercise, and talking. The reason being is when we breathe through our nose a bunch of very
interesting physiological responses happen. The first thing that your nose does is it acts as a
basic filter for particulate matter, but also for bacteria and viruses. The mucus and hairs
in your nose, the paranasal sinuses, all of this is designed as a really simple biological filter
for the air that's coming in. It also helps with humidification and temperature control, which
are very important. In your paranasal sinuses, when you breathe through your nose only it also
releases something called nitric oxide (NO). Nitric oxide is released in teeny tiny amounts
and its half-life is very short, so we need to continually breathe through our nose. But NO
levels are associated with cardiovascular health, vasodilation, circulation. It's really great for
you, but you can't get it through your mouth, you have to breathe through your nose. One other thing
that happens when you breathe through your nose is there are baroreceptors in your sinuses that help
to communicate to your brain to control your heart rate, it slows it down. And your blood pressure,
it lowers it. Now, we go to the flip side. All those things sound great. When we breathe through
our mouth, especially when it's not appropriate, like all through the night, here's what happens:
your teeth are really at risk, so cavities and bacteria can grow in your mouth, post nasal drip
in your throat can be a big problem for people, for young children chronic mouth breathing at
night can even contribute to a deformed palate, you can get increased heart rate, increase
blood pressure, probably of all the things we've talked about. However, just poor quality and poor
quantity of sleep can be really, really messed up by mouth breathing. OK, great. So, we slap a piece
of tape on our mouth and off we go. Well, it's not really that simple. If you've seen people do this
online, you'll see people making jokes with duct tape across their mouth, you'll also see people
with custom made bandages, taped gizmos that tape their mouth closed, and those are all possible
solutions. But on a very simple level, this is a safe practice. It's effective for children,
for older people, it doesn't matter your age. But you don't want to completely cut off your mouth.
The way to tape your mouth closed is to take essentially a bandage tape, so this is tape you
would get from the pharmacy, and you would snip a little clip of it and you would put it just in
the middle of your face. Now, here's the problem. You can probably see it now, I have a beard right,
so if you have facial hair it just doesn't work very well. But I've used this on my children
and off you go. You can see it falls off with me right away, so this method doesn't work that great
for me. Now, to solve this some manufacturers have custom-made bandages that fit over a fuzzy face
like mine and different size shapes. I still find that, whether it's my children or me,
no matter which taping device I use, I've never made it through an entire night. I rip it off,
I tear it off, I find it uncomfortable, just the fact of having the tape. People worry they're
going to suffocate. When you put it just on the front of your mouth, or if you're using
one of these customized bandages, there's never a risk of suffocation. It's never happened. You can
breathe freely, you can even open your mouth, you just don't. So, what are some alternatives? Well,
one alternative that very few people try, but can be even more effective,
is a chin strap. You can order these online, they just cost a few dollars. It does the same thing.
You put it around your head and it holds your chin closed. It's the same thing as taping your mouth,
but for a lot of people this is a lot less weird, they don't freak out their bed partner,
a lot simpler, and it also doesn't leave a red mark on your face in the morning. Why is
our mouth hanging open anyway? Well, for some of us, we have chronically blocked sinuses, for some
of us we just getting a funny posture, some of us we just have bad habits that we need to overcome.
We often think of snoring and mouth breathing as something that affects 80-year-old men and
it does disproportionately, but it also affects an eight-month-old baby who gets in a funny position,
a young child will wheeze and snore and, while that's not life-threatening, it's also not optimal
for blood pressure, for that NO release, for their heart rate, for filtration. So, it is something
we do want to address. It's not necessarily that snoring is something to be scared of, but it is
something that you should work to correct. So, a chin strap can be a really great, simple option,
and you don't have to keep putting tape on your face. Then there's one more option and as I'll
show you this you've probably seen people wearing these as well. These are something called Breathe
Right strips and you can buy these online or in pharmacies, and I imagine there's a couple of
other brands. This is the only one that I've ever used, but essentially what these are are butterfly
strips that go on your nose and they help to keep your nose open. Why would this be important? Well,
I have quite a large nose and I have these big turbines of sinus openings, but many people just
don't, their nose opening is relatively small, and they're often blocked with mucus, and something
like Breathe Right strips, when placed on the bridge of your nose here, can help to
open up your sinuses and allow you to breathe more freely. In fact, for some people these
are so effective they don't bother with the chin strap, they don't bother with taping their nose at
all. Something like this can have a dramatic effect. Of everything that I've showed you,
these strips, these Breathe Right strips, for most people give them a really dramatic
difference. In fact, I can feel this right now. My breathing passageways are much more open,
I don't need it right now in the middle of the day, but they're much, much more open. Now, before
you do any of these things, whether you're taping your mouth, whether you're wearing a chin strap,
or whether you're trying some of these strips to expand and open your nose, it's important that
you do some basic hygiene for your sinuses. What does that mean? On a fundamental level, if your
nose is all blocked up with mucus you can strap your chin, tape your mouth, you're still going to
struggle to breathe. So, make sure before you go to bed you do a really thorough sinus cleaning.
That might look like after you brush your teeth cleaning out your nose, that might look like a
nasal flush with a neti pot, or one of the aerosol sprays, that might also look like deploying one of
the other Buteyko techniques, which is holding your breath at the bottom of an exhale. In the
Buteyko tradition, this is called a control pause, meaning we pause with our breath, we
allow the CO2 to build, we click start on a timer. And what that does is it can act as a natural
bronchodilator to open up your breathing passageways here, but also your sinuses.
I'll show you how to do this because ideally you would not just wear one of these gizmos or tricks,
but you'd also do your best to optimize your breathing before you try one of those tricks.
Here's how it works, the control pause. We inhale gently and then we exhale. We inhale gently
and then we exhale. Inhale gently and then exhale. And as you get to the bottom of the breath,
hold your nose and hold your breath at the bottom.
When you feel the slightest bit of breath hunger I'd like you to breathe in. And breath hunger
is when you feel like I should breathe. It's not when your diaphragm twitches, it's not when your
body convulses, it's definitely not when you get a headache, or feel dizzy. It's just the slightest
bit of breath hunger. For most people, when they start off, 10 to 20 seconds will be the maximum
they can hold comfortably. No matter what your control pause number is, do not push, just go to
where you're comfortable and then repeat it four times, tape your mouth, put your chin strap on,
put your Breathe Right strip on, and go to bed. It can make a big, big difference. Four rounds of
control pause. You'll find that your control pause naturally goes up very, very quickly over time,
but what happens when you hold the breath like that is your blood oxygen it doesn't change at
all, but your CO2 in your lungs that goes up dramatically and that CO2, this is what we
learned from Dr Buteyko, it acts like a natural bronchodilator. You can feel your breathing ways
open up and this can set you up for a really great night's sleep. If you'd like to learn more about
the Buteyko method, I usually refer people to Patrick McKeown. He's been a guest on the podcast
a couple of times, I'll put links down in the show notes here, and he's got a couple of great books
as well. If you'd like more science-based yoga videos, please hit subscribe down below. If you
have had experience with any of these techniques, whether it's the Breathe Right strips, or chin
straps, or taping your mouth, I'd love to hear if it's been working for you down below. You can
always find my teaching calendar at yogabody.com and I hope to see you in the next video.