I’ve spent the past 30 nights taping my mouth shut when I go to sleep. Why the heck would someone risk suffocating in the night? Actually, if your body truly began to suffocate while you were asleep, you’d wake up. That’s what sleep apnea is all about. If the body really can’t get oxygen, it yanks you back to consciousness. People with sleep apnea don’t remember waking up repeatedly all night because their airway clears before they have to come fully awake, so they slip back to sleep quickly.

With no danger of actually suffocating, I don’t see any risk in taping one’s mouth shut at night. I read James Nestor’s Breath and decided to try it. I wanted to get these benefits from mouth taping:

1. No longer waking up with a dry mouth from mouth-breathing.
2. Deeper, more refreshing sleep.
3. Less waking up during the night.
4. Less snoring.
5. More alertness when it’s time to get up in the morning.

I started out using Nexcare Steri-Strips. I placed two strips across my lips, leaving plenty of room to open my mouth on the sides, in case that was necessary. After the first night, I woke up with my mouth closed and no dry mouth. One goal achieved!

But my mouth clearly wanted to be open. After that first night, I started waking up with my lips apart, in spite of the tape. I switched to thick, white medical tape. But that only lasted about a week. The tape didn’t stay on well, and it prevented me from yawning. Being completely sealed up didn’t feel quite right either.

Next I ordered Sleepy Koala tape from Walmart. It kept my lips together, while the opening left me able to yawn, cough, and breathe through my mouth if necessary. I’ve stuck with it, but it’s actually too sticky and I really have to pull to get it off. There’s also MyoTape which doesn’t cover the lips at all, but works more like a “reminder” to your mouth to stay closed. I might try that next.

James Nestor uses a one-inch strip of 3M Nexcare Durapore “durable cloth” tape, and doesn’t cover his whole mouth. Ideally, the tape should just remind your mouth to stay shut.

Nestor points out that every animal on earth, including humans, naturally breathes through the nose with the mouth closed, with the exception of dogs that sometimes pant. Only humans breathe through the mouth as a habit.

Consider that babies breathe through their noses even when asleep. In fact, if babies couldn’t breathe through their noses, they’d have trouble nursing. But at some point, many of us unlearn our natural nose-breathing and then mouth-breathing causes all kinds of problems such as sleep disorders, oral bacterial overgrowth and bad breath, teeth misalignment, and poor facial development. It might even affect ADHD and other behavioral problems. If you wake up with a dry mouth or a headache (or a wet pillow), you’re probably mouth-breathing when you’re asleep.

Nestor makes a strong case for only breathing through the nose at all times, so for a month I’ve also made a point of doing that. Keeping my mouth shut, plus doing a Buteyko breathing exercise every morning has already increased my lung capacity.

But when I’m unconscious, my mouth wants to open, hence the tape. I’ve seen many YouTube videos and read articles that describe success after only a few days of mouth taping, but my experience was different. It took several days for wearing tape at night to feel comfortable, and for over two weeks nothing about my sleep patterns changed at all. I kept waking up all night long, just as usual. One or three times a night I’d get up to go to the bathroom or to close the window or to open the window. My whole nighttime routine stayed disappointingly the same except now I had tape on my mouth.

I’ve learned from Nestor that during deep sleep, the pituitary gland secretes hormones that include vasopressin, which regulates the storing of water in the cells. If it works properly while we’re in the deepest stage of sleep, we don’t feel thirsty and our kidneys take a break so we don’t need to urinate. But when repeated lack of air keeps us out of that deep stage of sleep, our kidneys keep right on producing urine and we wake up needing to go, sometimes several times a night.

Over two weeks went by before I noticed that I wasn’t waking up as much. It was like my body finally started to relax into the taping routine. In the last week and a half, there have even been nights when I didn’t get up at all! I can tell because when I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I move the rug next to the toilet. On mornings when my bathroom rug hasn’t been moved, it’s stunning.

So at 30 days I can say I’ve achieved three of my goals: I no longer wake up with a dry mouth, I’m waking up less at night (although most nights I do still wake up), and I snore less. It might be weird to regularly record one’s snoring, but I believe snoring is a health indicator.

My neighbors in the apartment below probably appreciate my reduced snoring as well as my reduced moving around at night. I also wake up a little more alert than before. I look forward to that increasing.

Nestor says the tape is really just for training. After a while your mouth should stay shut without it. I have no idea how long that takes, but I think it’ll be a good while before my mouth stays shut naturally on its own.

So I’ll keep up the taping. I want to sleep through every night without waking up and I definitely want more of that alertness in the morning. How wonderful to wake up and not long to go right back to sleep. I want to see how much energy mouth taping can bring me.

Close Your Mouth. And Chew: Link between chewing and snoring.

Buteyko Breathing: Increasing the capacity of your lungs to extract oxygen.

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