Mouth Tape: Does It Cause Better Sleep Overnight?

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Mouth Tape: Does It Cause Better Sleep Overnight?

In this article, we’ll explore the potential health benefits of mouth-taping on a variety of sleep related conditions: snoring, sleep apnea and allergies.

What is mouth tape?

It’s as simple as it sounds, this is an at home technique which involves taping the mouth when you sleep, that real is it.

As the theory goes, forcing the mouth shut at night and during sleep, you will breathe through your nose by default, thereby avoiding issues associated with mouth breathing.

Breathing is actually… very important and studies continue to reinforce the value of correct and deliberate breathing in both healthy people and even those with chronic conditions.

Ensuring that you have the correct breathing while you sleep is vital for high quality rest and well-being, and a mounting body of evidence suggests incorrect breathing is leading to a whole host of sleep related conditions.

What are the benefits of nasal breathing?

Ever heard the British insult ‘mouth breather’?

It’s an odd one, but it strikes an important idea here: breathing through the mouth is bad.

When you breathe correctly through the nose you actually end up with a whole host of benefits:

  • Nasal breathing helps keep your sinuses clear
  • You significantly decrease your chance of snoring
  • Nasal breathing even raises your blood oxygen saturation or SpO2
  • As well as balancing out the PH levels found in your mouth, associated with a range of chronic mouth conditions

If that doesn’t pique your interest, you may be surprised to find out that mouth breathing is associated with a whole host of serious conditions such as:

  • Asthma
  • Teeth grinding and TMJ
  • Dry mouth
  • Sleep apnea

As well as potentially more serious conditions like: hypertension (high blood pressure) and increased heart rate.

How Does Mouth Tape Work

Mouth taping is simpler than you think. It involves…taping…your….mouth. That’s it. Essentially by blocking your mouth, it prevents you becoming a default mouth breather. Instead, you’re forced to breathe through your nose. This creates a whole cascade of things that improve various health markers – and can help lead to better sleep.

mouth-tape-nose-breathing-somnifix
image via Somnifix

Does Mouth Tape Help with Snoring?

Snoring is often a symptom of a larger facial posture issue. It’s not the core problem. What mouth tape does it force nasal breathing which forces both the tongue and the palate into a different posture. this movement helps change the jaw position that causes snoring for most mild forms of snoring.

However, mouth tape is not an alternative for people with severe sleep apnea and should not be considered a replacement for a CPAP machine.

Benefits of Mouth Taping

Some of the benefits of mouth taping you might experience include:

  • Improved mild obstructive sleep apnea
  • Dry mouth
  • Cavities
  • Gum disease
  • Bad breath

Research on mouth tape as a treatment is still new, but growing quickly as it’s a very inexpensive at home experiment to try for yourself and see if it works.

How to get started with Mouth Taping

So, you’re keen to try it out.. before you just get a roll of duct tape out and go to town, it’s worth taking a couple of steps to prepare.

1. Consider applying vaseline or other jelly product to your lips before taping them – this will help with irritation.

It may be worth shaving also if you have lots of facial hair.. ouch!

2. Place the tape across your mouth horizontally, covering the whole lips and ensuring a good seal.

  1. Be cognizant about how you breathe. While it might be uncomfortable at first, your body will naturally adapt to nasal breathing over time.

Important – it’s worth trying this out for an hour or two while awake to see how it feels, anything which feels constrictive or uncomfortable around breathing at night can’t be very unpleasant.

FAQs About Mouth Tape

Some of the most frequent questions we get on mouth tape are:

Can You Use Duct Tape on Your Mouth?

Yes, but we don’t recommend it – especially if you have any sort of hair on your face. Even if you don’t duct tape leaves residue on your face and will make it kind of gross to take off & start your morning routine.

Can You Use 3m Tape on Your Mouth?

Yes, this is the popular DIY at home solution if you do not want to start buying a ton of mouth tape products.

What Is the best tape for mouth taping?

Our recommended mouth taping product is the mouth strips from Somnifix here. If you don’t use those, try the at home 3M technique.

Where can I buy mouth tape?

Glad you asked.. there are a range of specialist mouth tapes available for purchase now that the market has begun to exapnd.

Our recommended mouth tape of choice is from Somnifix.

somnifixi-mouth-tape
image via Somnifix

Its simple, straightforward and cheap enough that we don’t mind paying a little extra for the comfort.

Buy Somnifix mouth tape here

You can also head over to our equipment section to find one from you.

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Joel Runyon

Joel is the founder of IMPOSSIBLE and the founder of MoveWell. Joel founded MoveWell after sustaining an injury while running an ultra marathon on every continent. Joel is writes about mobility, pain management and health and wellness overall.