Why It Matters How You Breathe

A few months ago, I read an article about a mouth-taping trend. No, it wasn’t something that husbands wish their wives would do to stop talking (though I’m sure my husband would love that), but it was meant to prevent mouth-breathing at night. I laughed out loud, tossed the article aside, and shrugged it off as evidence that people will do the strangest things.

And I didn’t give breathing so much as another thought. That is, I started reading the book The Joy of Well-Being by wellness leaders Jason and Colleen Wachob. The very first chapter of the book is about breathing. I thought that was an odd choice. Surely exercise, nutrition, and even cold plunges would make for better candidates for the premier chapter of a wellness book, right? But the more I read about the physiology of breathing, the more convinced I became that I have been overlooking one of the easiest, cheapest, and most important methods of wellness in the world. And in case you’re also skeptical, I wanted to share with you what I’ve learned.

As proof as to how ignorant I’ve been about the importance of breathing correctly, if I had to guess at the percentage of people with “dysfunctional” breathing patterns, I’d guess it to be low. Turns out, 50 to 80 percent of adults breathe too hard, too fast, or through their mouth (which, as we’ll see in a moment, is bad). This dysfunctional breathing can lead to snoring, sleep apnea (and disrupted sleep in general), anxiety, allergies, asthma, fatigue, and a whole host of other problems.

 So what is the proper way to breathe? Breathe through your nose.

Why? For many reasons, but primarily because that’s how humans were originally designed to breathe. James Nestor, a prominent nasal breathing advocate, points to how our nasal passages and airways have become gradually smaller since the days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This is because, since the development of agriculture, we don’t need to chew our food as much, so the bone structure of the face has changed. The result? Our bodies were originally built for nasal breathing, but we’ve adapted smaller features that make it harder for us to do it.

One of the big benefits of nasal breathing is that it helps protect us from infection. The nose contains little hairs called cilia that trap germs and particles and prevent their entry into our lungs. The mouth doesn’t have that filter.

The second benefit of nasal breathing has to do with improved oxygen delivery to your body. Here’s a little blood chemistry (and as an anesthesiologist, I can geek way out on blood chemistry), but I’ll try to explain it to you simply. Every time you take a breath, you inhale oxygen. That oxygen travels to your lungs and gets released into your bloodstream, where it can travel to all the tissues in your body. Every exhale, you breathe out the carbon dioxide that comes from your bloodstream into your lungs to be released. So you inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide.

The problem is that you breathe faster through your mouth than through your nose. When you breathe through your mouth, you release more carbon dioxide from your bloodstream into your lungs and out your mouth. Your blood levels of carbon dioxide drop, and your body’s response to this is for the blood to hold onto more oxygen instead of releasing it to the tissues that need it. So if you want to deliver more oxygen to your body, you paradoxically want to slow down your breathing (by breathing through your nose), which builds up a little more carbon dioxide, and this will allow the oxygen to be released to the tissues like your muscles to use. For anyone who wants to look this up and see it on a graph (which I’m sure is no one), it’s called the oxygen-hemoglobin dissociation curve.

Nasal breathing has been shown to decrease allergies and asthma because your nasal passages warm and humidify the air as it enters your lungs. It even soothes stress and anxiety by tapping into the parasympathetic (“rest and digest”) nervous system. As Andrew Huberman of Stanford points out, when you lengthen your exhale (such as breathing out through your nose or exhaling through pursed lips) you’ll reflexively lower your heart rate to help get you out of an anxious or heightened state.

The benefits of nasal breathing don’t end there – it also can enhance fitness. I wanted to share with you a study I found in the book The Joy of Well-Being that was done at Colorado State University. Athletes were trained to breathe through their noses during training for six months. At the end of the study, they were able to achieve the same level of intensity in their workouts with 22 percent less breathlessness. When you breathe through your nose during exercise, you save the oxygen consumption that you’d otherwise use to recruit muscles for more vigorous mouth breathing, and the delivery of oxygen to your muscles improves.

So will I try mouth-taping? Debatable (although I have friends who swear by it!). But I will say that nasal breathing and breathwork has taken on a whole new priority for me. I pay attention to breathing through my nose when I’m walking my dogs, working out, sitting around, and especially when I’m feeling stressed or agitated. There’s a whole world of breathwork that I’m eager to explore, and there are so many benefits that there’s absolutely no reason NOT to do it! It’s free, easy, and painless. And just maybe (my husband hopes), I’ll finally learn to keep my mouth shut.

Finally, I wanted to point out that most of this information was adapted from the book The Joy of Well-Being by Jason and Colleen Wachob. This is a small fraction of the information they share about breathing. If you’d like to learn more, I recommend the book as an invaluable resource, not just for breathwork, but as a balanced and actionable approach to enhancing your overall health and well-being. (And no, this blog is not sponsored, haha. It’s just my personal opinion that the book is really great.)

In good health,

Gina