YOU ARE HOW YOU BREATHE

6 min readAug 3, 2020

I’m not a big fan of “hacking” your way to greatness in performance or health. The term “hack” implies that you are doing something in a way that it wasn’t designed. In reality, most “hacks” are just realizations that we are doing something wrong or inefficiently. Take breathing for example…

There are some real common knowledge deficiencies around the purpose of our noses that persist even today. My personal misconceptions included; noses are primarily for smelling, noses are just backup and breathing is just breathing regardless of how you do it.

I’m sure these aren’t misconceptions that only I had. If you thought any of these things read on to see how poorly you’ve been treating your nose and what you can do to “hack” your breathing situation…*cough cough* I mean start using your nose how it’s actually designed to be used.

Noses are just a backup

You can breathe with your mouth or you can breathe with your nose, there isn’t much of a difference between the two…so my thinking went. I assumed that we have a backup in case one gets blocked like if you get gagged or someone breaks your nose. In my mind violent altercations are most likely. This isn’t the case.

The nose is a better filter than the mouth. The nose has hairs that prevent particulates in the air from getting into your lungs. The mouth doesn’t have this adaptation. Ever inhaled a bug through your nose? I haven’t, it always ends up in my mouth.

If you breathe through your mouth almost exclusively you may be messing with your mouth function and potentially the function of your digestive tract as a whole. When you breathe through your nose it’s much easier to maintain a nice moist mouth. That’s not the case when you mouth-breathe, the environment of your mouth is generally much drier. There’s potential second and third order effects of a dry mouth with less saliva that could be affecting your ability to taste and break down foods early in the digestive process.

The whole shape of the mouth changes in young children that mouth breathe. The roof of the mouth moves up and takes up real estate that would otherwise be used by the sinuses. The upward movement of the roof of the mouth means the face grows narrower than it would have otherwise. If you want a chiseled wide face mouth breathing is a sure way to prevent that. When you put two and two together you can easily see how many modern orthodontic issues are potentially a result of a more narrow mouth that has less room for an evenly spaced line of teeth. Don’t forget the lost sinuses space, that usually correlates to more sinus issues like headaches or head colds as well.

The scariest side effect of reconciling your nose as a backup breather is its potential impact on the stress response.

Breathing is just breathing

The superior nasal meatus has receptors that are believed to be able to mediate the activity of the autonomic nervous system and other brain activities. No nose breathing and you’re potentially missing out on some low hanging stress management fruit.

The autonomic nervous system is famously that automatic system that switches us between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The poorly named sympathetic nervous system has no sympathy for your problems, it’s the one that makes you feel anxious, in a fight it will cause you to automatically flee the scene or fight with a rage you didn’t know you had. The parasympathetic nervous system is the one that’s running the show when you’re calm, cool, and collected, it’s also the one you’re in when you are sleeping, relaxed, and when your body is most apt to heal itself or fight an illness.

Both systems are equally important but considering the fact that most of us are always stressed or agitated these days we need a lot more parasympathetic time and less sympathetic time. If there are sensors in the nose that can use cues from your breathing to trigger the switch from one to the other that you aren’t using this may be one area for you to strongly consider improving to help with your overwhelming anxiety and/or agitation.

We’re great at adapting

Whenever you notice your breath ensure it’s through your nose, even when it’s difficult like while exercising or during a cold.

One of the adaptations of the body that is most impressive is that it does adapt. If you work out, your body becomes better at working out. If you do Sudoku puzzles daily, your brain will get better as Sudoku. If you consciously practice having more empathy for others, you’ll become a nicer person. If you always freak out when something goes wrong, your body will start freaking out for you before you even realize what’s going on.

So, if you stop breathing from your nose your body will start to shrink your nose holes. If you start breathing through your nose more it will open back up those air highways that you call nostrils.

Back in 2017, when life was simple, there was some research to see if the body is better at working out when you breathe through your nose or your mouth. The research was rather disappointing for schnozz advocates. The mouth out-performed. That doesn’t close the book on the debate though. Those study participants were normal people used to breathing in a normal way. The normal way I was always told to breathe when working out was through the mouth, or at best in the nose and out the mouth, never only through the nose. That means these participants weren’t used to training while breathing only through their nose. So their nasal passages weren’t adapted to the potential benefits.

If we can potentially regulate stress better by breathing through our noses it can logically be assumed that training through our noses would result in a more composed version of ourselves being the version that’s conducting the training. If you’re a fighter, athlete, or regularly in stressful situations that require physical activity I shouldn’t need to explain to you how beneficial nose breathing could be.

You should absolutely breathe through your nose when you train, especially when the stakes are low. When the ante goes up you’ll be much better equipped to nose breathe and keep your stress response from completely overwhelming you. Train how you want to fight.

This is why Voldemort lost.

He couldn’t breathe through his nose well (Shit! Did he even really have a nose?), his stress response was out of control and he made poor decisions when the going got tough. That’s what actually gave Harry Potter the upper hand, I”m sure of it.

Everything we do or fail to do in our bodies will have second and third and fourth and fifth order effects that we may or may not like. You may begin exercising to lose weight but end up realizing that it completely changes your perspective on life and your position in it.

You may start breathing through your mouth out of necessity due to childhood allergies and end up greatly regretting not dealing with the issue years later when your face ends up narrower, your teeth crooked, and your ability to handle adversity greatly diminished.

Handle stress better, breathe through your nose.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.