80/20 Breathing

There's a pretty short list of Fundamental Things We Do Every Day – eat, sleep, breathe – where it's plausible that spending vast amounts of our time and money on improving them is actually worthwhile, because they'll have such an impact on the course of our lives. Yet, like most people, I struggle to implement that in practice.

The long version of how to breathe better is in books like Breath. I'm now in the weird position of believing that Butyeko Breathing might improve my life really significantly, if I managed to do a 10 minute exercise most days for a year, but (spoiler) I have been completely unable to follow through on that belief by doing the exercise. However, I do think I've got some of the benefits by doing the following easy things:

Always breathe through your nose, no matter what

Your nose is made for breathing; your mouth is not. Your nose warms, moisturizes and filters air for you, your mouth does not. In short, mouth breathing should be used only as an absolute last resort. The best training for this is

1) consciously breathe through your nose while exercising – this is hard at first, and might require targetting your cardio level to be just as much as you can manage without opening your mouth, but it seems to pretty quickly increase your capacity/instinct for nose-breathing more generally.

2) just generally shut your mouth whenever you notice you're breathing through it – over time your mouth will just shut more by default.

Tape your mouth while you sleep

The last time I recommended mouth-tape on here, beloved friends of the blog S. & S. reported they "kept thinking this was some sort of a satire." I assure you I'm serious: buy a box of 3M Surgical Micropore tape and tape your mouth shut every night before you sleep. This will make you breathe through your nose rather than your mouth at night.