Mouth Breathing is Bad for You Or Is It?
Disruption to your sleep, snoring, increased daily blood sugars, stress and anxiety are just some of the symptoms from chronic mouth breathing all day and at night. But is all mouth breathing bad for you?
#1: Communicate
Verbal Communication is a controlled mouth-exhalation combined with a vocalization of that exhale. Extremely obvious you might say but it is still optimal for communicating vocally! Now they do say you have two ear and one mouth so you should listen twice as much as you speak. But still, the fact you can talk alone means that mouth breathing isn’t all evil, rather there is a time and a place for it. Having said that, I still recommend you inhale through your nose when speaking. By inhaling through your nose, you’ll slow your breath, filter the air and get all the great benefits of breathing, even when speaking.
#2: Express Emotion
Love and Joy, anger and hatred are all expressed by the body in the movements we make and the way we breathe. Laughing, crying and shouting are all expressions of emotions through the breath, the voice and the body. Just look at a baby that wants something. It can't tell you what it wants because it doesn't have the vocabulary nor the skill to express it but the baby can tell you how it feels by expressing emotion - loudly!
When you stop expressing yourself as clearly as children do, you still create those feelings, they just don't get released. Instead they are suppressed inside your body. Suppressing these emotions results in the emotions being locked into your body. If you continue this habit, it becomes ingrained into your mind, posture and breath. You embody these emotions and adapt around them. With enough time suppressing emotions, youc hange your whole outlook on life, your personality and your quality of life.
You can see these trends when you analyse people’s breath and posture often enough. Think of a depressed person for example. They are withdrawn from the world typically. Head down, rounded shoulders and upper back, turned in to protect themselves from the world. Their breath is low and slow. The exhale is controlled and they react to stress with either a breath hold or a controlled exhale. I’m not saying this is a diagnosis. Rather, I’m explaining the common threads I see when working with people almost every day of my life. I can see the same trends with other states of being too. Your body and breath reflect your state of mind.
#3: Release Tension
When you suppress your breath and ingrain it into our system your muscles tighten and you can develop tension in your mouth, jaw, tongue, throat, neck, shoulders and upper chest. You can release this tension by opening your mouth wide with a large inhale. This is a reset for the body. By stretching, inhaling and yawning we teach the brain that its ok to let go of all that tension. The brain listens to our action and let’s go of it all. Without your ability to breathe in and out of the mouth you would have wired this tension into your systems for life.
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