I don’t know if you are aware, but there is a whole THING about “breathing correctly.” I have read one (1) book on the topic, so now I am ready to tell you. (Also, I can tell you that if you read such a book, you will feel the entire time as if you can’t quite catch your breath.)
1. Breathe ONLY through your nose. ONLY THE NOSE. NOT THE MOUTH. THE MOUTH IS THE POISON BREATH. YOU WILL DIE IF YOU BREATHE THROUGH YOUR MOUTH. EVEN WHILE VIGOROUSLY EXERCISING. HOW ARE YOU NOT ALREADY DEAD, WHEN I’VE TOLD YOU IT WAS POISON AND YET YOU HAVE BEEN DOING IT FOR DECADES.
2. Except if breathing out. You can breathe OUT through your mouth if you want. That’s fine.
3. Breathe slow and shallow, or possibly slow and deep, or maybe it was slow and shallow on inhale and slow and deep on exhale. There were some mixed messages. Approximately five in/out breath-sets per minute is pretty ideal, all the ancient religions say so.
4. You know how you think you breathe for oxygen? Actually what you want is the carbon dioxide, which you may remember is the stuff you think of yourself as breathing OUT. Or I guess you want both? I was a little unclear.
5. You breathe TOO MUCH. All Americans do!! It’s like how you EAT TOO MUCH. You just BINGE on that air. You FEAST on it. You OVERINDULGE. You’re DISGUSTING AND GREEDY, and it makes you FLABBY WITH AIR. Things that are vital to your existence are things you should be depriving yourself of. Depriving yourself will feel bad, which is how it is SUPPOSED to feel.
6. You can tape your mouth closed at night, so that you won’t accidentally breathe through your mouth. This is the best tape. Yes, I have ordered the tape. No, I have not yet tried it, because the idea of taping my mouth shut at night freaks me right out. Yes, yes, I did order it though. (Paul tried it last night, and said it worked perfectly with just a one-inch strip on the center of his mouth.)
7. I skipped the second half of the book, where he was like “These are the REAL good breathing methods, but also be careful because if you do them wrong you might accidentally give yourself brain damage and/or die.” Just, skipped right past all that.
Why did I take this book out of the library, you may be asking yourself/me. It’s because I am noticing that my heart is doing the weird thing it did last election, where it kind of flippers around, especially if I’ve had any caffeine. I’d thought a book on breathing might be helpful/soothing.
My daughter is a sleep-talker. I was talking about it at work because it had been messing up my sleep and a co-worker suggested I could tape her mouth shut. It took me a minute to realize she wasn’t joking, because apparently this is a thing.
(I am absolutely, 100% a mouth breather. After a certain amount of time trying to breath through my nose I feel like I am suffocating. A couple of women in my family have gotten surgery to do…something…to their nasal passages, and I am a little curious, but not curious enough to seriously consider face surgery as a solution to the mostly non-problem of mouth breathing).
Same. My sinuses have been a mess since I was a child so I’ve always mostly breathed through my mouth. The thought of taping my mouth shut is enough to fill me with panic so no thank you to that suggestion.
Oy vey, that sounds scare tactic-y and over the top. Mouth breathing is something to investigate in children. I know SLPs are really interested in airway structure and health for littles. Persistent mouth breathing in kids is associated with dental issues, airway problems, swallowing issues, etc. But I think as people grow and experience things, like maybe getting a deviated septum or what have you, mouth breathing becomes less of an issue. And also adults can make choices for their own bodies, and if they want to breathe through their mouths sometimes, it’s literally fine.
As a yoga teacher, I taught breathwork! I would never say someone is breathing wrong though. But I do think that breathwork can help with anxiety; “box breathing” is particularly helpful. In through the nose, hold, slow exhale. Sometimes, when I am anxious or upset, I put a hand on my stomach and feel it move as I breathe very slowly.
Now, as for breathing through your mouth – well, sometimes this is necessary. Has the author never been in a situation where the stench is unbearable? Also, what if you have a cold? I hate how black and white these things get, they make people feel shitty for doing something that is natural “wrong.” It’s ridiculous!
So. Um. I did tape my mouth shut for awhile because I was having problems with snoring and possibly some sleep apnea (though I went for a sleep study and was told “no worries” or words to that effect). For awhile I tried something you can find examples of if you search on “head strap to keep mouth closed while sleeping” at Amazon, and it was OK. Helped, not uncomfortable, just mildly annoying (and possibly sometimes fell off overnight? I forget). So, more internet searching and I did try taping my mouth and actually, it was fine. I sort of squished my lips together first so the tape mostly didn’t get on them (I just used some regular clear “bandage stuff” tape we already had, probably some 3M product) and … I think this (trying the taping) helped? After doing that for a while I seemed to have learned to (mostly) sleep with my mouth closed so now I don’t use it anymore.
As for breathing, huh. I have found 1 breathing activity (I guess you could call it an “exercise” but I prefer not to) that I sort of like for relaxing a bit that was labeled 4-4-4-4-4 — breathe in deeply, while counting to 4. Count to 4. Breathe out deeply while counting to 4. Count to 4. Repeat the whole routine 4 times. (I suppose one could adapt this to 3s or 5s or whatever works though I just started with 4 and have stuck with that. Of course one could also count more quickly or more slowly. I am now reminded of Monty Python’s Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, “Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.” So, you know…
So sorry to hear about the heart thing returning, sounds unpleasant at best! Oh, these times. Counting the days until I can cast my early vote.
Guess I’m just awaiting a slow death from chronic rhinitis then. That book sounds dumb. I say however you’re getting oxygen into your body, you’re doing it right.
I have a deviated septum in my nose and I am pretty sure I would die if I couldn’t breathe through my mouth. I should go to a specialist and Do Something About This (my sister has and she says it is amazing to be able to breathe properly for the first time in her life) but who has time for these things? Anyway, my point is that I do not believe I will be reading this book.
This post reminds me of the gem you wrote on sleeping … everyone sleeping in the night . .. quiet house … not moving … so good! Please write a book or something.
I am 100% not a doctor, so you should talk to your doctor. But: I have a ton of medical Things going on, so this may not apply to normal-bodied people, but a quarter or half-tablet of metoprolol (beta blocker) helps me with the chest flippy thing (I feel reasonably comfortable saying this because you can only get it via prescription so if it is the *wrong* thing for you, your doctor would likely know). I have heard some people have it prescribed as-needed for stage fright; in that case, it’s basically to stop the feedback loop where you can feel your body kind of freaking out so you freak out *more* so then your body freaks out more. If that seems potentially applicable, it is maybe worth asking about; it is generally low on side effects aside from reducing your blood pressure depending on dosage. There is a short-acting (tartrate) and long-acting (succinate) version, so if you want full-day effects (aka this is Most Of The Time for you), you go for succinate, and if you want faster-onset but just 4-6 hours-ish (aka the flippies are only occasional but last more than half an hour [how long it takes to kick in, probably, ish?] *or* you can predict when they’re likely to hit, i.e. taking it an hour before you read the daily news or something), then you go for tartrate.
I would note that most doctors are used to full tablet (25mg) dosages, which work fine for normal to high blood pressure people, but not for low blood pressure people; they need to split the pills or their blood pressure goes even lower which is also not fun.
Again, I am not a doctor, definitely talk to your doctor, but this is a fairly low side effect thing that can potentially knock down that specific unpleasantness and ease stress on you and your body by a wee bit.
(without, of course, addressing the entirely legitimate *source* of that stress and also YES I wish this were not as stressful as it is and I hope breathing works well for you)(we now have a “register to vote!” yard sign from Etsy; ordering that helped a bit? Results may vary, etc.)
Whenever I think about how I’m breathing, my rhythm gets messed up and I can’t breathe normally. That’s one of the reasons I don’t like meditation. I think that book would really mess me up!
Thank you! I can’t stand any kind of instructions about how to breath, or much attention paid to it, for exactly this reason!
This is exactly what I was going to say! I politely decline any suggestion to breathe in a certain way. Not gonna do it; it doesn’t help. That said, my current yoga class is a listen-to-your-body sort of thing, and I do benefit from slowing down and breathing deeply in a way that feels good to me without any defined breath-holding of a certain duration. That’s been really helpful.
I’ve been a mouth-breather forever, and I know it makes my breaths shallow. My poor oxygen-starved brain.
I have recently “discovered” (via TikTok) that if I pooch my cheeks out hard (à la Dizzy Gillespie) it becomes markedly easier to breathe deeply through my nose. I found it ASTOUNDING. Try it. Go on, no one’s looking. :)
That’s so funny! I tried it, and then immediately felt like I was struggling desperately to breathe through my nose, to the point where I had to unpooch- the exact opposite of your experience!
THIS IS WILD. Why does this work?? I have sinus and septum issues so breathing exclusively through my nose is challenging / does not feel like it provides enough oxygen. Pooched cheeks: IT HELPS. HOW! WHY!!?
I’m naturally a nose breather under normal circumstances, and it did absolutely nothing to stop me from becoming a snorer in the last couple of years. My brother is a mouth breather and can’t chew with his mouth closed, and it’s only recently occurred to me it might be because of a medical issue like a deviated septum instead of just his troglodyte ways.
OK, but it’s still gross.
My friends and I commiserate on our husbands’ chewing. If they can’t help it, fine, bu then we need to released from eating with them, and they don’t get to act offended when we take our plates into another room.
This book sounds like a nightmare!
I do generally breathe through my nose; but one nostril (while still able to inhale) just “feels” like it doesn’t get as much as air as the other (deviated septum? Who knows?).
This may be a good example of how much your own perspective matters. I read that book. I found some of it interesting, a bit of it helpful and other parts laughable. None of it was dramatic or frightening to me, and I had quite different take aways. I didn’t buy tape because I don’t particularly breathe through my mouth. I did buy the Turkish gum, because I wondered if I would feel a difference. (No, I did not.)
I read some of this book and then the ebook expired and I didn’t re-borrow it. Was there not something about breathing through the mouth being counter-intuitively better sometimes? I do try the one-nostril breathing thing for a while sometimes – Adriene from Yoga With Adriene also does it and I find it helpful when I want to really breathe slowly and calmly. Mostly I found it kind of annoying and I enjoyed your review of it more.
“Flabby with air”. Lol!
I have the heart flip floppy thing too. It’s often a food allergy according to my doctor. I discovered mine was connected to Stevia or any artificial sweetener.
When I read the part about taping your mouth shut I said no loud enough to scare the cat.
Oh!! I do pretty regularly eat artificial sweeteners, so I will check this out! Thank you for this!
I think box breathing and circular breathing are basically the same thing, probably because once I focus on my breathing I can’t breathe normally anymore. The hyperawareness of breath doesn’t make me zen or whatever it is supposed to do; it makes me more anxious than I already was. One size fits all anything really fits nobody.
The heart-flippy thing is also called palpitations. They can come from anxiety, and breathing can help. Caffeine makes it worse; so does dehydration. Falling levels of estrogen can it, and so can thyroid issues. Potassium can help if your diet isn’t very high in it.
Oh this sure sounds like what I have. Caffeine does seem to make it worse, and I am quite sure I have falling levels of estrogen.
On the potassium thing … I have normal blood levels of potassium and no obvious reason to think about this (potassium).
As I’ve gotten older, various things about my body have changed. My blood pressure had gone up into the “well, that’s not ideal” range (between 120-140 and 80-90), and I’d started having my muscles cramp up randomly and painfully (sitting in recliner and left thigh muscle suddenly says, “Remember me?!” and refuses to shut up.
On that first thing, I asked my GP about it and he was more or less, “eh,” but I thought back to my 20s when my then-GP looked at my then-BP and said, “Wow, that’s blood pressure that’ll be low forever!” Apparently not a promise. So I thought about what I’d been doing differently in my 20s (lots) and decided I needed to get more exercise and lose weight. I worked hard for like 2 years and did (lost maybe 5% of my weight, not tons) and … my BP changed hardly at all.
When I was in my 20s, I kept a very busy schedule, fed only myself, and often turned to my favorite convenience food, the banana. I mean, I ate like 4 per day. Not kidding.
Anyway, long story short (or not) I for some reason (the cramps, maybe) decided to up my potassium. Doing this with supplements is very difficult (3% of RDA per pill) but I discovered I could buy the no-salt salt and mix it with water and drink it (not a great taste, but tolerable and it’s grown on me) and intially I started taking 1/4 tsp per day (15% of RDA) and then for a bit upped it to 1/2 tsp. My BP dropped almost immediately (like, within a week) to <120 and <80, and the muscle cramps went away.
I kept taking the potassium for awhile and found I was getting light-headed. My BP never registered absurdly low, but I remember the light-headedness as a problem in my 20s and cut back on the potassium. Now I only take it if I start noticing muscle cramps beginning to inch in. And I check my BP from time to time and it is lovely. The kind that stays low forever!
All of which is to say that maybe supplementing potassium is useful for some things that may arise as we get older, and it's hard to supplement using the, well, supplements, but easy to do so using the no-salt stuff.
(Also, the internet tells me that if I over-ingest potassium I'll almost surely just pee it out, unless I go totally nuts on the over-ingestion or have kidney problems. But as you've probably deduced, I am not a doctor and wasn't doing this under any particular medical advice so, you know, gather the info. that's right for, and make the decisions that are right for, you.)
Oops, forgot to explain the significance of the in-my-20s banana diet, but they’re a great source of potassium.
Just be careful because you can have too much potassium in your system and it will cause your muscles to stop functioning properly (including heart). My mother almost died from a potassium overload.
… I am strongly in favor of potassium supplementation, *but* definitely be cautious with the supplemental potassium, it being potentially lethal is in fact the reason that potassium supplements are only 3% of your RDA.
I also use potassium salt for potassium, but definitely keep a vague eye on the total RDA of the major potassium sources you’re ingesting; there’s at least one case study where someone nearly died from rehydrating with only coconut water while exercising in the heat, but also that’s “don’t drink a *ton* of coconut water in one afternoon” [he got almost a gram more than the total RDA of potassium in a short period of time] not “don’t increase your potassium intake if it’s kind of low” https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCEP.113.000941
Another high potassium thing is low-salt V8, incidentally (recommended to me by the Mayo Clinic), and it’s got all sorts of other nutrients in it. (But lite salt really is the easiest; cheap, shelf-stable, easy to adjust the quantity, and as long as you don’t heat it up, it’s not *that* bad, esp. if you add lime or something to the water. Just: keep an eye on your banana, potato, coconut water, and supplemental intake and stay near the RDA instead of going over.)
In general, it can be useful to get an electrolyte blood panel at a normal doctor’s visit, when you’re eating/drinking normally, and then adjust anything that’s low-ish. If potassium’s not the thing, I’d endorse trying out magnesium supplements for both cramps and improving sleep; if magnesium gluconate does nothing for you on either, though, you may be doing fine on magnesium already. (this is the thing, a lot of the nutrition stuff – vitamin D, magnesium, potassium, iron – works like *magic* if you have a deficiency, and works more strongly the worse the deficiency is – and does not do much at all if you’re already in the enough-for-your-body-to-do-its-thing levels on the vitamin/mineral front. But when you do find out that oh, hey, that fatigue is actually just anemia and *we can fix it*, or those muscle twinges go away with an extra banana per day, or we get to sleep 3x faster with magnesium on board, it is such a glorious thing because it’s such an easy fix and also means our bodies are under less strain!)
Too funny. That sounds like the worst book ever. Just reading your post is making me self conscious about breathing. Sorry it didn’t help! I did recently see an ad for that tape and was also horrified, but I did suggest it to my husband who snores. We didn’t buy it.
I picked this book up of the shelf at a friend’s house and read part of it during the few days I was there as a houseguest. I did not finish it and did not have any desire to locate a copy once I got home. It seemed full of alarmism, extremism, flim-flam and pseudo science. It also felt self-contradictory: first few chapters – you don’t breathe enough, then suddenly in the next chapter – you breath too much. No practical info on how a regular person might use breathing to relax, calm themselves down; no acknowledgment of the fact that if you are reading the book you are actually breathing sufficiently well to keep yourself alive and conscious.
Also wanted to agree with comments above that talked about heart flip-flops and thyroid disease. This is how my husband first found out he had Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (episodes of palpitations) and the flip-floppiness has recurred a few times when he needed an adjustment in medication.
I’ve seen ads for a brand of that tape people use on their mouths and night and it’s called (I kid you not) Hostage Tape.
I know nothing about breathing. But a maker I follow (photography and pottery) has been posting about her panic attack journey. How she was prone to panic attacks (she didn’t even know that’s what they were at first) for 26 years and how she found this book (https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Your-Anxiety-Panic-Treatments/dp/0197584098/ref=sr_1_1?crid=37ZH8YT38W4G&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.SOChVRJuWSiIny9t25Uj7RqQayxpZBF7HgrP4t5-Ql24A6-snRxWDZ4-cCS8liuyxWFtCV9nC0t6QazSNKRxy7C9AuSvv_vxNy_OvDGEmp7ABoBgAPcBLQ4JOqBFmM-Fg5mSg9AjrfiXiwAfYYl42rh8DxJC_UT3gTWwOk5r7ikcPv4WNedBZAWa0xpUJ-72oJ1_ycT5Jo4Y-tEqgVkE2glincDlwVQGWihnMfVqmpQ.3zJT85XmtsSi5hXMkiVrpoXqOWLxa7Q_XbL_qtZq67I&dib_tag=se&keywords=mastery+of+your+anxiety+and+panic&qid=1725411763&sprefix=mastery+of+your+anxiety+and+pani%2Caps%2C120&sr=8-1) with cognitive behavior therapy and how she did the workbook (very important, owning the book will do nothing for you) and in 6 weeks felt healed enough that her fear of doing things was gone. I have never had a panic attack, and yet….I remain interested in this book and the exercises because I live in a world that’s constantly surprising me in unfortunate ways.
Anyways, election is in 8 weeks, if I buy this book NOW and start homeschooling myself through cognitive behavior therapy, maybe I will be calmer by then. I may try it.
My 5 year old daughter almost always has her mouth open and always breathes through her mouth, and her dentist told me it would be good to see a speech therapist for a few sessions to, basically, not do that. I found her explanation as to why this has to happen unhelpful, so I turned to my sister who is a physical therapist specialized in jaw-, nose- and lung/breathing. She told me plainly: “The nose is meant for breathing, the mouth for eating. Your nose can filter the air, basically purify it before it gets to your lungs. That’s what it has been designed to do. Your mouth can’t do that. This means that air that comes into your body through your mouth is likely more harmful for your lungs / body, plus your teeth are not meant to be exposed to air very often (hence more tooth decay and issues of bad breath in mouth-breathers). But, breathing through your mouth is better than not breathing at all, so go ahead and use your mouth when your nose is blocked :) “
That book! That book! I started that book and did not finish it. Enough said.
I’d just like to thank Swistle and her readers for letting me leave at least one book off my To Be Read pile. OK, piles, plural.
Luckily, I have consumed a lot of literature informing me that I’m doing something wrong, so that’s nice.
You made me laugh! Such greedy people we are, we even try to hog all the air! 🤣 Flabby with air! I can’t even imagine taping my mouth shut!!! Seems like a good way to suffocate.
It’s very strange… a TikTok creator (I think the author of this book?) came across my fyp recently and I watched the video. He basically said all of this and I’ve since been thinking about my breathing a lot more! I feel certain he was just spouting un-verified junk, but I still am thinking about it anyway.
And now I see this post come up on your blog! Now I’ll never be able to stop thinking about breathing.
My eldest needed myofunctional therapy along with her first (only? 🤞) round of braces. Apparently if you breath through your mouth, your tongue drops from the roof of your mouth which then doesn’t apply the consistent pressure to help expand/widen your upper jaw (lower jaw follows the upper somehow 🤷♀️).
Just my two cents as a therapist: breathing in activates our sympathetic nervous system (including increasing our heart rate), and it’s the breathing *out* that gets our parasympathetic nervous system on board. People who have a more sensitive system inherently and are more prone to anxiety or who have experienced trauma can be even further impacted by this activation. So breathing exercises that don’t operate on that foundation can make us feel worse.
It also can be dysregulating to pay attention to breathing because often times intentionally tuning into our bodies and inner experiences then opens the door to feeling everything that’s happening for us, and if there’s underlying anxiety, stress, or unprocessed stuff simmering there that’s usually helpfully compartmentalized, or even if this just is a foreign experience, we end up flooded. And then other protective mechanisms jump in to try to contain it, and so on.
Generalizing a bit here, but pop psych books or those that include the topic tend to be not trauma-informed and don’t take into account how their audience may interpret or respond to the content.
Oh! I knew about the heart flippy thing being connected to anxiety, and I’ve assumed to sugar as well (mine happens more if I’ve had too much sugar). I hadn’t known about estrogen and the thyroid being a contributor as well. I’m going through perimenopause and have Hashimoto’s, fun!
I can breathe through my nose for part of the night, but never for all of it. The idea of taping my mouth shut makes me TWITCH.
Even when I’m not actually sick, one nostril will be more blocked than the other. I have to lie on the clearer side until it swaps, then I can lie on the other side. I can’t sleep on my back. It’s very annoying sometimes, especially when the arthritic hips have their own opinion about which side I should lie on. Lay on? (I could go for some Lays)
Grammar was never my friend. (But I always got on well with Grampa) (yes I am hilarious)
Something similar happens for me when I am allergic to my pillows! And anti-allergy inner pillowcases turned out to be the answer. (also stopped my eyes from being swollen in the morning) Allerease cotton anti-allergy pillowcases are my favorite (they do not crinkle, but they still work).
(obviously, you may not be allergic to your pillows/bedding; it may just be a gravity thing or something else entirely. And if you mean the clearer nostril is “down” when you sleep on the correct side, then please ignore all of this.)
(also I got a chuckle out of your comment, so: at least *mildly* hilarious!)
I tried taping my mouth at night, which led to jaw pain…which led to my dentist recommending I do a sleep study, which led to a diagnosis of sleep apnea. (My dentist also told me to STOP TAPING.)
Grateful for the diagnosis…but taping definitely isn’t for everyone! (I tried taping for 9 months before I had the conversation with my dentist where she told me to stop and recommended the sleep study.)
I find the “Notice a thing you can see, a thing you can hear, a thing you can smell, a thing you can feel” exercise to be more soothing than breathing exercises. Like right now, I can see a blue wall, I can hear the air conditioning, I can smell the cleanser the cleaners used, I can feel the keyboard under my fingers.