Should You Breathe Through Your Mouth or Nose?
Most of us get it wrong, and doing it right offers immediate and long-term benefits to mind and body
“Try to breathe through your nose,” my wife’s online yoga instructor said the other day. “If you can’t, then breathe through your mouth.”
I thought both suggestions seemed pretty good. But I got to wondering why nose-breathing is so important. With a little sniffing around I found some answers and was reminded that — gasp! — most of us don’t breathe right. Dysfunctional breathing, as scientists like to call it, emphasizes what happens in the chest, instead of starting with the belly, as nature intended, and the incorrect approach apparently starts early in life.
Among Japanese K-12 students who participate in sports, a whopping 91% don’t breathe correctly, a new study finds. Getting it wrong hurts athletic performance and degrades both posture and core body stability, the researchers report in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.
There are several good reasons to learn good breathing practices, much research has found. Even a few simple, brief deep-breathing exercises, outlined further down, can:
- Relax your mind in the moment
- Reduce stress over the long-term
