Keep Your Mouth Shut!

Everyone knows the damage a big mouth can do, but have you ever considered the physical damage of opening your mouth?

Yes, breathing through your mouth is dangerous to your health! We must all become nose breathers from now on!

Having experienced episodes of hyperventilation often in my younger years, I thought I had outgrown them, and certainly thought I understood the symptoms, until recently. Some of the symptoms can be scary, but they are not life threatening: tight chest; feeling like you can’t catch your breath; tingling in hands, feet, and lips; dizziness or lightheadedness; among a few others.

Hyperventilation means that you breathe out too much carbon dioxide, which then causes an imbalance in the oxygen/carbon dioxide ratio. This can be caused by stress, which usually brings on an “attack,” of sorts; or it can be a result of improper breathing patterns, which can cause long-term difficulties such as lightheadedness or headaches, a racing heartbeat or heart and/or blood pressure problems, weak lungs, allergies (due to mouth breathing), chronic fatigue (due to improper oxygen/carbon dioxide balance), weak adrenals (chronic hyperventilation is like having your fight-or-flight response turned on all the time, which severely drains your adrenals), difficulty concentrating or remembering (brain doesn’t have enough oxygen), and can weaken all the inner organs (and cause eczema on the skin as well since mouth breathing causes more dehydration than usual).

Knowing that I have always been a mouth breather, I shall now attempt to keep my mouth shut and breathe through my nose and use my whole body to take deep healing breaths.

So, keep your mouth shut!